Apples to Apples: Learning Semantics of Common Entities Through a Novel Comprehension Task

Omid Bakhshandeh, James Allen


Abstract
Understanding common entities and their attributes is a primary requirement for any system that comprehends natural language. In order to enable learning about common entities, we introduce a novel machine comprehension task, GuessTwo: given a short paragraph comparing different aspects of two real-world semantically-similar entities, a system should guess what those entities are. Accomplishing this task requires deep language understanding which enables inference, connecting each comparison paragraph to different levels of knowledge about world entities and their attributes. So far we have crowdsourced a dataset of more than 14K comparison paragraphs comparing entities from a variety of categories such as fruits and animals. We have designed two schemes for evaluation: open-ended, and binary-choice prediction. For benchmarking further progress in the task, we have collected a set of paragraphs as the test set on which human can accomplish the task with an accuracy of 94.2% on open-ended prediction. We have implemented various models for tackling the task, ranging from semantic-driven to neural models. The semantic-driven approach outperforms the neural models, however, the results indicate that the task is very challenging across the models.
Anthology ID:
P17-1084
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
906–916
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1084
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1084
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Omid Bakhshandeh and James Allen. 2017. Apples to Apples: Learning Semantics of Common Entities Through a Novel Comprehension Task. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 906–916, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Apples to Apples: Learning Semantics of Common Entities Through a Novel Comprehension Task (Bakhshandeh & Allen, ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1084.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P17-1084.mp4
Data
MCTestSQuAD