Revisiting the Evaluation of Theory of Mind through Question Answering

Matthew Le, Y-Lan Boureau, Maximilian Nickel


Abstract
Theory of mind, i.e., the ability to reason about intents and beliefs of agents is an important task in artificial intelligence and central to resolving ambiguous references in natural language dialogue. In this work, we revisit the evaluation of theory of mind through question answering. We show that current evaluation methods are flawed and that existing benchmark tasks can be solved without theory of mind due to dataset biases. Based on prior work, we propose an improved evaluation protocol and dataset in which we explicitly control for data regularities via a careful examination of the answer space. We show that state-of-the-art methods which are successful on existing benchmarks fail to solve theory-of-mind tasks in our proposed approach.
Anthology ID:
D19-1598
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5872–5877
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1598
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1598
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matthew Le, Y-Lan Boureau, and Maximilian Nickel. 2019. Revisiting the Evaluation of Theory of Mind through Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 5872–5877, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Revisiting the Evaluation of Theory of Mind through Question Answering (Le et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1598.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1598.Attachment.pdf