Systems for knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain question answering (QA) usually consist of two stages: efficient retrieval of relevant documents from a large corpus and detailed reading of the selected documents. This is usually done through two separate models, a retriever that encodes the query and finds nearest neighbors, and a reader based on Transformers. These two components are usually modeled separately, which necessitates a cumbersome implementation and is awkward to optimize in an end-to-end fashion. In this paper, we revisit this design and eschew the separate architecture and training in favor of a single Transformer that performs retrieval as attention (RAA), and end-to-end training solely based on supervision from the end QA task. We demonstrate for the first time that an end-to-end trained single Transformer can achieve both competitive retrieval and QA performance on in-domain datasets, matching or even slightly outperforming state-of-the-art dense retrievers and readers. Moreover, end-to-end adaptation of our model significantly boosts its performance on out-of-domain datasets in both supervised and unsupervised settings, making our model a simple and adaptable end-to-end solution for knowledge-intensive tasks.

Generative question answering (QA) models generate answers to questions either solely based on the parameters of the model (the closed-book setting) or additionally retrieving relevant evidence (the open-book setting). Generative QA models can answer some relatively complex questions, but the mechanism through which they do so is still poorly understood. We perform several studies aimed at better understanding the multi-hop reasoning capabilities of generative QA models. First, we decompose multi-hop questions into multiple corresponding single-hop questions, and find marked inconsistency in QA models’ answers on these pairs of ostensibly identical question chains. Second, we find that models lack zero-shot multi-hop reasoning ability: when trained only on single-hop questions, models generalize poorly to multi-hop questions. Finally, we demonstrate that it is possible to improve models’ zero-shot multi-hop reasoning capacity through two methods that approximate real multi-hop natural language (NL) questions by training on either concatenation of single-hop questions or logical forms (SPARQL). In sum, these results demonstrate that multi-hop reasoning does not emerge naturally in generative QA models, but can be encouraged by advances in training or modeling techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/jzbjyb/multihop.

We study the problem of building entity tagging systems by using a few rules as weak supervision. Previous methods mostly focus on disambiguating entity types based on contexts and expert-provided rules, while assuming entity spans are given. In this work, we propose a novel method TALLOR that bootstraps high-quality logical rules to train a neural tagger in a fully automated manner. Specifically, we introduce compound rules that are composed from simple rules to increase the precision of boundary detection and generate more diverse pseudo labels. We further design a dynamic label selection strategy to ensure pseudo label quality and therefore avoid overfitting the neural tagger. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other weakly supervised methods and even rivals a state-of-the-art distantly supervised tagger with a lexicon of over 2,000 terms when starting from only 20 simple rules. Our method can serve as a tool for rapidly building taggers in emerging domains and tasks. Case studies show that learned rules can potentially explain the predicted entities.

Named entity recognition (NER) is well studied for the general domain, and recent systems have achieved human-level performance for identifying common entity types. However, the NER performance is still moderate for specialized domains that tend to feature complicated contexts and jargonistic entity types. To address these challenges, we propose explicitly connecting entity mentions based on both global coreference relations and local dependency relations for building better entity mention representations. In our experiments, we incorporate entity mention relations by Graph Neural Networks and show that our system noticeably improves the NER performance on two datasets from different domains. We further show that the proposed lightweight system can effectively elevate the NER performance to a higher level even when only a tiny amount of labeled data is available, which is desirable for domain-specific NER.

Recent works have shown that language models (LM) capture different types of knowledge regarding facts or common sense. However, because no model is perfect, they still fail to provide appropriate answers in many cases. In this paper, we ask the question, “How can we know when language models know, with confidence, the answer to a particular query?” We examine this question from the point of view of calibration, the property of a probabilistic model’s predicted probabilities actually being well correlated with the probabilities of correctness. We examine three strong generative models—T5, BART, and GPT-2—and study whether their probabilities on QA tasks are well calibrated, finding the answer is a relatively emphatic no. We then examine methods to calibrate such models to make their confidence scores correlate better with the likelihood of correctness through fine-tuning, post-hoc probability modification, or adjustment of the predicted outputs or inputs. Experiments on a diverse range of datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. We also perform analysis to study the strengths and limitations of these methods, shedding light on further improvements that may be made in methods for calibrating LMs. We have released the code at https://github.com/jzbjyb/lm-calibration.

Instead of using expensive manual annotations, researchers have proposed to train named entity recognition (NER) systems using heuristic labeling rules. However, devising labeling rules is challenging because it often requires a considerable amount of manual effort and domain expertise. To alleviate this problem, we propose GLARA, a graph-based labeling rule augmentation framework, to learn new labeling rules from unlabeled data. We first create a graph with nodes representing candidate rules extracted from unlabeled data. Then, we design a new graph neural network to augment labeling rules by exploring the semantic relations between rules. We finally apply the augmented rules on unlabeled data to generate weak labels and train a NER model using the weakly labeled data. We evaluate our method on three NER datasets and find that we can achieve an average improvement of +20% F1 score over the best baseline when given a small set of seed rules.

We study the problem of learning an event classifier from human needs category descriptions, which is challenging due to: (1) the use of highly abstract concepts in natural language descriptions, (2) the difficulty of choosing key concepts. To tackle these two challenges, we propose LeaPI, a zero-shot learning method that first automatically generate weak labels by instantiating high-level concepts with prototypical instances and then trains a human needs classifier with the weakly labeled data. To filter noisy concepts, we design a reinforced selection algorithm to choose high-quality concepts for instantiation. Experimental results on the human needs categorization task show that our method outperforms baseline methods, producing substantially better precision.

Language models (LMs) have proven surprisingly successful at capturing factual knowledge by completing cloze-style fill-in-the-blank questions such as “Punta Cana is located in _.” However, while knowledge is both written and queried in many languages, studies on LMs’ factual representation ability have almost invariably been performed on English. To assess factual knowledge retrieval in LMs in different languages, we create a multilingual benchmark of cloze-style probes for typologically diverse languages. To properly handle language variations, we expand probing methods from single- to multi-word entities, and develop several decoding algorithms to generate multi-token predictions. Extensive experimental results provide insights about how well (or poorly) current state-of-the-art LMs perform at this task in languages with more or fewer available resources. We further propose a code-switching-based method to improve the ability of multilingual LMs to access knowledge, and verify its effectiveness on several benchmark languages. Benchmark data and code have be released at https://x-factr.github.io.

Human Needs categories have been used to characterize the reason why an affective event is positive or negative. For example, “I got the flu” and “I got fired” are both negative (undesirable) events, but getting the flu is a Health problem while getting fired is a Financial problem. Previous work created learning models to assign events to Human Needs categories based on their words and contexts. In this paper, we introduce an intermediate step that assigns words to relevant semantic concepts. We create lightly supervised models that learn to label words with respect to 10 semantic concepts associated with Human Needs categories, and incorporate these labels as features for event categorization. Our results show that recognizing relevant semantic concepts improves both the recall and precision of Human Needs categorization for events.

We often talk about events that impact us positively or negatively. For example “I got a job” is good news, but “I lost my job” is bad news. When we discuss an event, we not only understand its affective polarity but also the reason why the event is beneficial or detrimental. For example, getting or losing a job has affective polarity primarily because it impacts us financially. Our work aims to categorize affective events based upon human need categories that often explain people’s motivations and desires: PHYSIOLOGICAL, HEALTH, LEISURE, SOCIAL, FINANCIAL, COGNITION, and FREEDOM. We create classification models based on event expressions as well as models that use contexts surrounding event mentions. We also design a co-training model that learns from unlabeled data by simultaneously training event expression and event context classifiers in an iterative learning process. Our results show that co-training performs well, producing substantially better results than the individual classifiers.