Comparative knowledge (e.g., steel is stronger and heavier than styrofoam) is an essential component of our world knowledge, yet understudied in prior literature. In this paper, we harvest the dramatic improvements in knowledge capabilities of language models into a large-scale comparative knowledge base. While the ease of acquisition of such comparative knowledge is much higher from extreme-scale models like GPT-4, compared to their considerably smaller and weaker counterparts such as GPT-2, not even the most powerful models are exempt from making errors. We thus ask: to what extent are models at different scales able to generate valid and diverse comparative knowledge?We introduce NeuroComparatives, a novel framework for comparative knowledge distillation overgenerated from language models such as GPT-variants and LLaMA, followed by stringent filtering of the generated knowledge. Our framework acquires comparative knowledge between everyday objects, producing a corpus of up to 8.8M comparisons over 1.74M entity pairs - 10X larger and 30% more diverse than existing resources. Moreover, human evaluations show that NeuroComparatives outperform existing resources in terms of validity (up to 32% absolute improvement). Our acquired NeuroComparatives leads to performance improvements on five downstream tasks.We find that neuro-symbolic manipulation of smaller models offers complementary benefits to the currently dominant practice of prompting extreme-scale language models for knowledge distillation.

Automatic code generation from natural language descriptions can be highly beneficial during the process of software development. In this work, we propose GAP-Gen, a Guided Automatic Python Code Generation method based on Python syntactic constraints and semantic constraints. We first introduce Python syntactic constraints in the form of Syntax-Flow, which is a simplified version of Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) reducing the size and high complexity of Abstract Syntax Tree but maintaining crucial syntactic information of Python code. In addition to Syntax-Flow, we introduce Variable-Flow which abstracts variable and function names consistently through out the code. In our work, rather than pretraining, we focus on modifying the finetuning process which reduces computational requirements but retains high generation performance on automatic Python code generation task. GAP-Gen fine-tunes the transformer based language models T5 and CodeT5 using the Code-to-Docstring datasets CodeSearchNet, CodeSearchNet AdvTest and Code-Docstring Corpus from EdinburghNLP. Our experiments show that GAP-Gen achieves better results on automatic Python code generation task than previous works

Gradient-based analysis methods, such as saliency map visualizations and adversarial input perturbations, have found widespread use in interpreting neural NLP models due to their simplicity, flexibility, and most importantly, the fact that they directly reflect the model internals. In this paper, however, we demonstrate that the gradients of a model are easily manipulable, and thus bring into question the reliability of gradient-based analyses. In particular, we merge the layers of a target model with a Facade Model that overwhelms the gradients without affecting the predictions. This Facade Model can be trained to have gradients that are misleading and irrelevant to the task, such as focusing only on the stop words in the input. On a variety of NLP tasks (sentiment analysis, NLI, and QA), we show that the merged model effectively fools different analysis tools: saliency maps differ significantly from the original model’s, input reduction keeps more irrelevant input tokens, and adversarial perturbations identify unimportant tokens as being highly important.

Neural NLP models are increasingly accurate but are imperfect and opaque—they break in counterintuitive ways and leave end users puzzled at their behavior. Model interpretation methods ameliorate this opacity by providing explanations for specific model predictions. Unfortunately, existing interpretation codebases make it difficult to apply these methods to new models and tasks, which hinders adoption for practitioners and burdens interpretability researchers. We introduce AllenNLP Interpret, a flexible framework for interpreting NLP models. The toolkit provides interpretation primitives (e.g., input gradients) for any AllenNLP model and task, a suite of built-in interpretation methods, and a library of front-end visualization components. We demonstrate the toolkit’s flexibility and utility by implementing live demos for five interpretation methods (e.g., saliency maps and adversarial attacks) on a variety of models and tasks (e.g., masked language modeling using BERT and reading comprehension using BiDAF). These demos, alongside our code and tutorials, are available at https://allennlp.org/interpret.