Yash Kankanampati


2023

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Remember what you did so you know what to do next
Manuel Ciosici | Alex Hedges | Yash Kankanampati | Justin Martin | Marjorie Freedman | Ralph Weischedel
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

We explore using the 6B parameter GPT-J language model to create a plan for a simulated robot to achieve 30 classes of goals in ScienceWorld, a text game simulator for elementary science experiments and for which previously published empirical work has shown large language models (LLM)s to be a poor fit (Wang et al., 2022). Using the Markov assumption, the LLM outperforms the state-of-the-art based on reinforcement learning by a factor of 1.4. When we fill the LLM’s input buffer with as many prior steps as will fit, improvement rises to 3.3x. Even when training on only 6.5% of the training data, we observe a 2.3x improvement over the state-of-the-art. Our experiments show that performance varies widely across the 30 classes of actions, indicating that averaging over tasks can hide significant performance issues.

2021

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Machine-Assisted Script Curation
Manuel Ciosici | Joseph Cummings | Mitchell DeHaven | Alex Hedges | Yash Kankanampati | Dong-Ho Lee | Ralph Weischedel | Marjorie Freedman
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Demonstrations

We describe Machine-Aided Script Curator (MASC), a system for human-machine collaborative script authoring. Scripts produced with MASC include (1) English descriptions of sub-events that comprise a larger, complex event; (2) event types for each of those events; (3) a record of entities expected to participate in multiple sub-events; and (4) temporal sequencing between the sub-events. MASC automates portions of the script creation process with suggestions for event types, links to Wikidata, and sub-events that may have been forgotten. We illustrate how these automations are useful to the script writer with a few case-study scripts.

2020

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Multitask Easy-First Dependency Parsing: Exploiting Complementarities of Different Dependency Representations
Yash Kankanampati | Joseph Le Roux | Nadi Tomeh | Dima Taji | Nizar Habash
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

In this paper we present a parsing model for projective dependency trees which takes advantage of the existence of complementary dependency annotations which is the case in Arabic, with the availability of CATiB and UD treebanks. Our system performs syntactic parsing according to both annotation types jointly as a sequence of arc-creating operations, and partially created trees for one annotation are also available to the other as features for the score function. This method gives error reduction of 9.9% on CATiB and 6.1% on UD compared to a strong baseline, and ablation tests show that the main contribution of this reduction is given by sharing tree representation between tasks, and not simply sharing BiLSTM layers as is often performed in NLP multitask systems.