Xinyan Yu


2023

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CREPE: Open-Domain Question Answering with False Presuppositions
Xinyan Yu | Sewon Min | Luke Zettlemoyer | Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

When asking about unfamiliar topics, information seeking users often pose questions with false presuppositions. Most existing question answering (QA) datasets, in contrast, assume all questions have well defined answers. We introduce CREPE, a QA dataset containing a natural distribution of presupposition failures from online information-seeking forums. We find that 25% of questions contain false presuppositions, and provide annotations for these presuppositions and their corrections. Through extensive baseline experiments, we show that adaptations of existing open-domain QA models can find presuppositions moderately well, but struggle when predicting whether a presupposition is factually correct. This is in large part due to difficulty in retrieving relevant evidence passages from a large text corpus. CREPE provides a benchmark to study question answering in the wild, and our analyses provide avenues for future work in better modeling and further studying the task.

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MURMUR: Modular Multi-Step Reasoning for Semi-Structured Data-to-Text Generation
Swarnadeep Saha | Xinyan Yu | Mohit Bansal | Ramakanth Pasunuru | Asli Celikyilmaz
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Prompting large language models has enabled significant recent progress in multi-step reasoning over text. However, when applied to text generation from semi-structured data (e.g., graphs or tables), these methods typically suffer from low semantic coverage, hallucination, and logical inconsistency. We propose MURMUR a neuro-symbolic modular approach to text generation from semi-structured data with multi-step reasoning. MURMUR is a best-first search method that generates reasoning paths using: (1) neural and symbolic modules with specific linguistic and logical skills, (2) a grammar whose production rules define valid compositions of modules, and (3) value functions that assess the quality of each reasoning step. We conduct experiments on two diverse data-to-text generation tasks like WebNLG and LogicNLG. The tasks differ in their data representations (graphs and tables) and span multiple linguistic and logical skills. MURMUR obtains significant improvements over recent few-shot baselines like direct prompting and chain-of-thought prompting, while also achieving comparable performance to fine-tuned GPT-2 on out-of-domain data. Moreover, human evaluation shows that MURMUR generates highly faithful and correct reasoning paths that lead to 26% more logically consistent summaries on LogicNLG, compared to direct prompting.

2022

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Beyond Counting Datasets: A Survey of Multilingual Dataset Construction and Necessary Resources
Xinyan Yu | Trina Chatterjee | Akari Asai | Junjie Hu | Eunsol Choi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

While the NLP community is generally aware of resource disparities among languages, we lack research that quantifies the extent and types of such disparity. Prior surveys estimating the availability of resources based on the number of datasets can be misleading as dataset quality varies: many datasets are automatically induced or translated from English data. To provide a more comprehensive picture of language resources, we examine the characteristics of 156 publicly available NLP datasets. We manually annotate how they are created, including input text and label sources and tools used to build them, and what they study, tasks they address and motivations for their creation. After quantifying the qualitative NLP resource gap across languages, we discuss how to improve data collection in low-resource languages. We survey language-proficient NLP researchers and crowd workers per language, finding that their estimated availability correlates with dataset availability. Through crowdsourcing experiments, we identify strategies for collecting high-quality multilingual data on the Mechanical Turk platform. We conclude by making macro and micro-level suggestions to the NLP community and individual researchers for future multilingual data development.