The facts and time in the document are intricately intertwined, making temporal reasoning over documents challenging. Previous work models time implicitly, making it difficult to handle such complex relationships. To address this issue, we propose MTGER, a novel Multi-view Temporal Graph Enhanced Reasoning framework for temporal reasoning over time-involved documents. Concretely, MTGER explicitly models the temporal relationships among facts by multi-view temporal graphs. On the one hand, the heterogeneous temporal graphs explicitly model the temporal and discourse relationships among facts; on the other hand, the multi-view mechanism captures both time-focused and fact-focused information, allowing the two views to complement each other through adaptive fusion. To further improve the implicit reasoning capability of the model, we design a self-supervised time-comparing objective. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the TimeQA and SituatedQA datasets. Furthermore, MTGER gives more consistent answers under question perturbations.

On vision-language understanding (VLU) tasks, fusion-encoder vision-language models achieve superior results but sacrifice efficiency because of the simultaneous encoding of images and text. On the contrary, the dual encoder model that separately encodes images and text has the advantage in efficiency, while failing on VLU tasks due to the lack of deep cross-modal interactions. To get the best of both worlds, we propose DiDE, a framework that distills the knowledge of the fusion-encoder teacher model into the dual-encoder student model. Since the cross-modal interaction is the key to the superior performance of teacher model but is absent in the student model, we encourage the student not only to mimic the predictions of teacher, but also to calculate the cross-modal attention distributions and align with the teacher. Experimental results demonstrate that DiDE is competitive with the fusion-encoder teacher model in performance (only a 1% drop) while enjoying 4 times faster inference. Further analyses reveal that the proposed cross-modal attention distillation is crucial to the success of our framework.

In this paper, we propose a simple few-shot domain adaptation paradigm for reading comprehension. We first identify the lottery subnetwork structure within the Transformer-based source domain model via gradual magnitude pruning. Then, we only fine-tune the lottery subnetwork, a small fraction of the whole parameters, on the annotated target domain data for adaptation. To obtain more adaptable subnetworks, we introduce self-attention attribution to weigh parameters, beyond simply pruning the smallest magnitude parameters, which can be seen as combining structured pruning and unstructured magnitude pruning softly. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the full model fine-tuning adaptation on four out of five domains when only a small amount of annotated data available for adaptation. Moreover, introducing self-attention attribution reserves more parameters for important attention heads in the lottery subnetwork and improves the target domain model performance. Our further analyses reveal that, besides exploiting fewer parameters, the choice of subnetworks is critical to the effectiveness.

Research into the area of multiparty dialog has grown considerably over recent years. We present the Molweni dataset, a machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset with discourse structure built over multiparty dialog. Molweni’s source samples from the Ubuntu Chat Corpus, including 10,000 dialogs comprising 88,303 utterances. We annotate 30,066 questions on this corpus, including both answerable and unanswerable questions. Molweni also uniquely contributes discourse dependency annotations in a modified Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT; Asher et al., 2016) style for all of its multiparty dialogs, contributing large-scale (78,245 annotated discourse relations) data to bear on the task of multiparty dialog discourse parsing. Our experiments show that Molweni is a challenging dataset for current MRC models: BERT-wwm, a current, strong SQuAD 2.0 performer, achieves only 67.7% F1 on Molweni’s questions, a 20+% significant drop as compared against its SQuAD 2.0 performance.