Making inferences in text comprehension to understand the meaning is essential in language processing. This work studies the entailment verification (EV) problem of complex, multi-sentence premises requiring a system to make multiple inferences implicitly. Modern applications of EV in detecting inconsistent model-generated rationales require complex multi-hop reasoning. However, current textual inference datasets mostly contain short-sentence premises that partially focus on this. To address this, we compile an EV benchmark that includes datasets from three NLP domains (NLI, contextual QA, and rationales) containing multi-sentence premises. On benchmarking humans and LLMs, we find that LLMs are better than humans in multi-hop reasoning across extended contexts, while humans perform better in simple deductive reasoning tasks. We also finetune a Flan-T5 model for EV using two training objectives to obtain a strong open-source model that outperforms GPT-3.5 and rivals GPT-4. Finally, we use our finetuned model to filter out inconsistent model-generated rationales in self-consistency decoding, resulting in a 6% accuracy improvement on average across three MCQ datasets.

The proliferation of fake news has emerged as a severe societal problem, raising significant interest from industry and academia. While existing deep-learning based methods have made progress in detecting fake news accurately, their reliability may be compromised caused by the non-transparent reasoning processes, poor generalization abilities and inherent risks of integration with large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we propose TELLER, a novel framework for trustworthy fake news detection that prioritizes explainability, generalizability and controllability of models. This is achieved via a dual-system framework that integrates cognition and decision systems, adhering to the principles above. The cognition system harnesses human expertise to generate logical predicates, which guide LLMs in generating human-readable logic atoms. Meanwhile, the decision system deduces generalizable logic rules to aggregate these atoms, enabling the identification of the truthfulness of the input news across diverse domains and enhancing transparency in the decision-making process. Finally, we present comprehensive evaluation results on four datasets, demonstrating the feasibility and trustworthiness of our proposed framework.

While recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven useful in answering user queries, they are prone to hallucination, and their responses often lack credibility due to missing references to reliable sources. An intuitive solution to these issues would be to include in-text citations referring to external documents as evidence. While previous works have directly prompted LLMs to generate in-text citations, their performances are far from satisfactory, especially when it comes to smaller LLMs. In this work, we propose an effective training framework using fine-grained rewards to teach LLMs to generate highly supportive and relevant citations, while ensuring the correctness of their responses. We also conduct a systematic analysis of applying these fine-grained rewards to common LLM training strategies, demonstrating its advantage over conventional practices. We conduct extensive experiments on Question Answering (QA) datasets taken from the ALCE benchmark and validate the model’s generalizability using EXPERTQA. On LLaMA-2-7B, the incorporation of fine-grained rewards achieves the best performance among the baselines, even surpassing that of GPT-3.5-turbo.

In question answering requiring common sense, language models (e.g., GPT-3) have been used to generate text expressing background knowledge that helps improve performance. Yet the cost of working with such models is very high; in this work, we finetune smaller language models to generate useful intermediate context, referred to here as elaborations. Our framework alternates between updating two language models—an elaboration generator and an answer predictor—allowing each to influence the other. Using less than 0.5% of the parameters of GPT-3, our model outperforms alternatives with similar sizes and closes the gap with GPT-3 on four commonsense question answering benchmarks. Human evaluations show that the quality of the generated elaborations is high.

Multimodal misinformation on online social platforms is becoming a critical concern due to increasing credibility and easier dissemination brought by multimedia content, compared to traditional text-only information. While existing multimodal detection approaches have achieved high performance, the lack of interpretability hinders these systems’ reliability and practical deployment. Inspired by Neural-Symbolic AI which combines the learning ability of neural networks with the explainability of symbolic learning, we propose a novel logic-based neural model for multimodal misinformation detection which integrates interpretable logic clauses to express the reasoning process of the target task. To make learning effective, we parameterize the symbolic logical elements using neural representations, which facilitate the automatic generation and evaluation of meaningful logic clauses. Additionally, to make our framework generalizable across diverse misinformation sources, we introduce five meta-predicates that can be instantiated with different correlations. Results on three public datasets (Twitter, Weibo, and Sarcasm) demonstrate the feasibility and versatility of our model.

Today’s language models can be remarkably intelligent yet still produce text that contains trivial commonsense errors. Therefore, we seek a retrospective verification approach that can reflect on the commonsense plausibility of the machine text, and introduce Vera, a general-purpose model that learns to estimate the commonsense plausibility of declarative statements. To support diverse commonsense domains, Vera is trained on ~7M commonsense statements that are automatically converted from 19 QA datasets and two commonsense knowledge bases, and using a combination of three training objectives. When applied to solving commonsense problems in the verification format, Vera substantially outperforms existing models that can be repurposed for commonsense verification, even including GPT-3.5/ChatGPT/GPT-4, and it further exhibits generalization capabilities to unseen tasks and provides well-calibrated outputs. We find that Vera excels at filtering machine-generated commonsense knowledge and is useful in detecting erroneous commonsense statements generated by models like ChatGPT in real-world settings.

Large language models (LLMs) have showcased their capability with few-shot inference known as in-context learning. However, in-domain demonstrations are not always readily available in real scenarios, leading to cross-domain in-context learning. Besides, LLMs are still facing challenges in long-tail knowledge in unseen and unfamiliar domains. The above limitations demonstrate the necessity of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA). In this paper, we study the UDA problem under an in-context learning setting to adapt language models from the source domain to the target domain without any target labels. The core idea is to retrieve a subset of cross-domain elements that are the most similar to the query, and elicit language model to adapt in an in-context manner by learning both target domain distribution and the discriminative task signal simultaneously with the augmented cross-domain in-context examples. We devise different prompting and training strategies, accounting for different LM architectures to learn the target distribution via language modeling. With extensive experiments on Sentiment Analysis (SA) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks, we thoroughly study the effectiveness of ICL for domain transfer and demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models.

In this work, we study Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) in a challenging self-supervised approach. One of the difficulties is how to learn task discrimination in the absence of target labels. Unlike previous literature which directly aligns cross-domain distributions or leverages reverse gradient, we propose Domain Confused Contrastive Learning (DCCL), which can bridge the source and target domains via domain puzzles, and retain discriminative representations after adaptation. Technically, DCCL searches for a most domain-challenging direction and exquisitely crafts domain confused augmentations as positive pairs, then it contrastively encourages the model to pull representations towards the other domain, thus learning more stable and effective domain invariances. We also investigate whether contrastive learning necessarily helps with UDA when performing other data augmentations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DCCL significantly outperforms baselines, further ablation study and analysis also show the effectiveness and availability of DCCL.

Multi-hop reading comprehension requires an ability to reason across multiple documents. On the one hand, deep learning approaches only implicitly encode query-related information into distributed embeddings which fail to uncover the discrete relational reasoning process to infer the correct answer. On the other hand, logic-based approaches provide interpretable rules to infer the target answer, but mostly work on structured data where entities and relations are well-defined. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning based inductive logic reasoning method that firstly extracts query-related (candidate-related) information, and then conducts logic reasoning among the filtered information by inducing feasible rules that entail the target relation. The reasoning process is accomplished via attentive memories with novel differentiable logic operators. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we evaluate it on two reading comprehension datasets, namely WikiHop and MedHop.

Sarcasm is a linguistic phenomenon indicating a discrepancy between literal meanings and implied intentions. Due to its sophisticated nature, it is usually difficult to be detected from the text itself. As a result, multi-modal sarcasm detection has received more and more attention in both academia and industries. However, most existing techniques only modeled the atomic-level inconsistencies between the text input and its accompanying image, ignoring more complex compositions for both modalities. Moreover, they neglected the rich information contained in external knowledge, e.g., image captions. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical framework for sarcasm detection by exploring both the atomic-level congruity based on multi-head cross attentions and the composition-level congruity based on graph neural networks, where a post with low congruity can be identified as sarcasm. In addition, we exploit the effect of various knowledge resources for sarcasm detection. Evaluation results on a public multi-modal sarcasm detection dataset based on Twitter demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model.

Currently, deep learning models have been widely adopted and achieved promising results on various application domains. Despite their intriguing performance, most deep learning models function as black boxes, lacking explicit reasoning capabilities and explanations, which are usually essential for complex problems. Take joint inference in information extraction as an example. This task requires the identification of multiple structured knowledge from texts, which is inter-correlated, including entities, events, and the relationships between them. Various deep neural networks have been proposed to jointly perform entity extraction and relation prediction, which only propagate information implicitly via representation learning. However, they fail to encode the intensive correlations between entity types and relations to enforce their coexistence. On the other hand, some approaches adopt rules to explicitly constrain certain relational facts, although the separation of rules with representation learning usually restrains the approaches with error propagation. Moreover, the predefined rules are inflexible and might result in negative effects when data is noisy. To address these limitations, we propose a variational deep logic network that incorporates both representation learning and relational reasoning via the variational EM algorithm. The model consists of a deep neural network to learn high-level features with implicit interactions via the self-attention mechanism and a relational logic network to explicitly exploit target interactions. These two components are trained interactively to bring the best of both worlds. We conduct extensive experiments ranging from fine-grained sentiment terms extraction, end-to-end relation prediction, to end-to-end event extraction to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Though deep learning has achieved significant success in various NLP tasks, most deep learning models lack the capability of encoding explicit domain knowledge to model complex causal relationships among different types of variables. On the other hand, logic rules offer a compact expression to represent the causal relationships to guide the training process. Logic programs can be cast as a satisfiability problem which aims to find truth assignments to logic variables by maximizing the number of satisfiable clauses (MaxSAT). We adopt the MaxSAT semantics to model logic inference process and smoothly incorporate a weighted version of MaxSAT that connects deep neural networks and a graphical model in a joint framework. The joint model feeds deep learning outputs to a weighted MaxSAT layer to rectify the erroneous predictions and can be trained via end-to-end gradient descent. Our proposed model associates the benefits of high-level feature learning, knowledge reasoning, and structured learning with observable performance gain for the task of aspect-based opinion extraction.

In fine-grained opinion mining, extracting aspect terms (a.k.a. opinion targets) and opinion terms (a.k.a. opinion expressions) from user-generated texts is the most fundamental task in order to generate structured opinion summarization. Existing studies have shown that the syntactic relations between aspect and opinion words play an important role for aspect and opinion terms extraction. However, most of the works either relied on predefined rules or separated relation mining with feature learning. Moreover, these works only focused on single-domain extraction, which failed to adapt well to other domains of interest where only unlabeled data are available. In real-world scenarios, annotated resources are extremely scarce for many domains, motivating knowledge transfer strategies from labeled source domain(s) to any unlabeled target domain. We observe that syntactic relations among target words to be extracted are not only crucial for single-domain extraction, but also serve as invariant “pivot” information to bridge the gap between different domains. In this article, we explore the constructions of recursive neural networks based on the dependency tree of each sentence for associating syntactic structure with feature learning. Furthermore, we construct transferable recursive neural networks to automatically learn the domain-invariant fine-grained interactions among aspect words and opinion words. The transferability is built on an auxiliary task and a conditional domain adversarial network to reduce domain distribution difference in the hidden spaces effectively in word level through syntactic relations. Specifically, the auxiliary task builds structural correspondences across domains by predicting the dependency relation for each path of the dependency tree in the recursive neural network. The conditional domain adversarial network helps to learn domain-invariant hidden representation for each word conditioned on the syntactic structure. In the end, we integrate the recursive neural network with a sequence labeling classifier on top that models contextual influence in the final predictions. Extensive experiments and analysis are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and each component on three benchmark data sets.

Fine-grained opinion analysis aims to extract aspect and opinion terms from each sentence for opinion summarization. Supervised learning methods have proven to be effective for this task. However, in many domains, the lack of labeled data hinders the learning of a precise extraction model. In this case, unsupervised domain adaptation methods are desired to transfer knowledge from the source domain to any unlabeled target domain. In this paper, we develop a novel recursive neural network that could reduce domain shift effectively in word level through syntactic relations. We treat these relations as invariant “pivot information” across domains to build structural correspondences and generate an auxiliary task to predict the relation between any two adjacent words in the dependency tree. In the end, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results on three benchmark datasets.