CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning

Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Chunyang Li, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Baixuan Xu, Zhaowei Wang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Yangqiu Song


Abstract
The sequential process of conceptualization and instantiation is essential to generalizable commonsense reasoning as it allows the application of existing knowledge to unfamiliar scenarios. However, existing works tend to undervalue the step of instantiation and heavilyrely on pre-built concept taxonomies and human annotations to collect both types of knowledge, resulting in a lack of instantiated knowledge to complete reasoning, high cost, and limited scalability. To tackle these challenges, we introduce CANDLE (ConceptuAlizationand INstantiation Distillation from Large Language ModEls), a distillation framework that iteratively performs contextualized conceptualization and instantiation over commonsense knowledge bases by instructing large language models to generate both types of knowledge with critic filtering. By applying CANDLE to ATOMIC (Sap et al., 2019a), we construct a comprehensive knowledge base comprising six million conceptualizations and instantiated commonsense knowledge triples. Both types of knowledge are firmly rooted in the original ATOMIC dataset, and intrinsic evaluations demonstrate their exceptional quality and diversity. Empirical results indicate that distilling CANDLE on student models provides benefits across three downstream tasks. Our data and models are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CANDLE.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.128
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2351–2374
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.128
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.128
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Chunyang Li, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Baixuan Xu, Zhaowei Wang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, and Yangqiu Song. 2024. CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2351–2374, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning (Wang et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.128.pdf