Nikhil Ramesh


2021

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Entity-Based Knowledge Conflicts in Question Answering
Shayne Longpre | Kartik Perisetla | Anthony Chen | Nikhil Ramesh | Chris DuBois | Sameer Singh
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Knowledge-dependent tasks typically use two sources of knowledge: parametric, learned at training time, and contextual, given as a passage at inference time. To understand how models use these sources together, we formalize the problem of knowledge conflicts, where the contextual information contradicts the learned information. Analyzing the behaviour of popular models, we measure their over-reliance on memorized information (the cause of hallucinations), and uncover important factors that exacerbate this behaviour. Lastly, we propose a simple method to mitigate over-reliance on parametric knowledge, which minimizes hallucination, and improves out-of-distribution generalization by 4% - 7%. Our findings demonstrate the importance for practitioners to evaluate model tendency to hallucinate rather than read, and show that our mitigation strategy encourages generalization to evolving information (i.e. time-dependent queries). To encourage these practices, we have released our framework for generating knowledge conflicts.

2016

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Task Completion Platform: A self-serve multi-domain goal oriented dialogue platform
Paul Crook | Alex Marin | Vipul Agarwal | Khushboo Aggarwal | Tasos Anastasakos | Ravi Bikkula | Daniel Boies | Asli Celikyilmaz | Senthilkumar Chandramohan | Zhaleh Feizollahi | Roman Holenstein | Minwoo Jeong | Omar Khan | Young-Bum Kim | Elizabeth Krawczyk | Xiaohu Liu | Danko Panic | Vasiliy Radostev | Nikhil Ramesh | Jean-Phillipe Robichaud | Alexandre Rochette | Logan Stromberg | Ruhi Sarikaya
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations