Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language. Managing ambiguity is a key part of human language understanding, allowing us to anticipate misunderstanding as communicators and revise our interpretations as listeners. As language models are increasingly employed as dialogue interfaces and writing aids, handling ambiguous language is critical to their success. We capture ambiguity in a sentence through its effect on entailment relations with another sentence, and collect AmbiEnt, a linguist-annotated benchmark of 1,645 examples with diverse kinds of ambiguity. We design a suite of tests based on AmbiEnt, presenting the first evaluation of pretrained LMs to recognize ambiguity and disentangle possible meanings. We find that the task remains extremely challenging, including for GPT-4, whose generated disambiguations are considered correct only 32% of the time in crowdworker evaluation, compared to 90% for disambiguations in our dataset. Finally, to illustrate the value of ambiguity-sensitive tools, we show that a multilabel NLI model can flag political claims in the wild that are misleading due to ambiguity. We encourage the field to rediscover the importance of ambiguity for NLP.

Theory of Mind (ToM)—the ability to reason about the mental states of other people—is a key element of our social intelligence. Yet, despite their ever more impressive performance, large-scale neural language models still lack basic theory of mind capabilities out-of-the-box. We posit that simply scaling up models will not imbue them with theory of mind due to the inherently symbolic and implicit nature of the phenomenon, and instead investigate an alternative: can we design a decoding-time algorithm that enhances theory of mind of off-the-shelf neural language models without explicit supervision? We present SymbolicToM, a plug-and-play approach to reason about the belief states of multiple characters in reading comprehension tasks via explicit symbolic representation. More concretely, our approach tracks each entity’s beliefs, their estimation of other entities’ beliefs, and higher-order levels of reasoning, all through graphical representations, allowing for more precise and interpretable reasoning than previous approaches. Empirical results on the well-known ToMi benchmark (Le et al., 2019) demonstrate that SymbolicToM dramatically enhances off-the-shelf neural networks’ theory of mind in a zero-shot setting while showing robust out-of-distribution performance compared to supervised baselines. Our work also reveals spurious patterns in existing theory of mind benchmarks, emphasizing the importance of out-of-distribution evaluation and methods that do not overfit a particular dataset.

We introduce KiloGram, a resource for studying abstract visual reasoning in humans and machines. Drawing on the history of tangram puzzles as stimuli in cognitive science, we build a richly annotated dataset that, with >1k distinct stimuli, is orders of magnitude larger and more diverse than prior resources. It is both visually and linguistically richer, moving beyond whole shape descriptions to include segmentation maps and part labels. We use this resource to evaluate the abstract visual reasoning capacities of recent multi-modal models. We observe that pre-trained weights demonstrate limited abstract reasoning, which dramatically improves with fine-tuning. We also observe that explicitly describing parts aids abstract reasoning for both humans and models, especially when jointly encoding the linguistic and visual inputs.

We analyze language change over time in a collaborative, goal-oriented instructional task, where utility-maximizing participants form conventions and increase their expertise. Prior work studied such scenarios mostly in the context of reference games, and consistently found that language complexity is reduced along multiple dimensions, such as utterance length, as conventions are formed. In contrast, we find that, given the ability to increase instruction utility, instructors increase language complexity along these previously studied dimensions to better collaborate with increasingly skilled instruction followers.

We study continual learning for natural language instruction generation, by observing human users’ instruction execution. We focus on a collaborative scenario, where the system both acts and delegates tasks to human users using natural language. We compare user execution of generated instructions to the original system intent as an indication to the system’s success communicating its intent. We show how to use this signal to improve the system’s ability to generate instructions via contextual bandit learning. In interaction with real users, our system demonstrates dramatic improvements in its ability to generate language over time.

Crowdsourcing from non-experts is one of the most common approaches to collecting data and annotations in NLP. Even though it is such a fundamental tool in NLP, crowdsourcing use is largely guided by common practices and the personal experience of researchers. Developing a theory of crowdsourcing use for practical language problems remains an open challenge. However, there are various principles and practices that have proven effective in generating high quality and diverse data. This tutorial exposes NLP researchers to such data collection crowdsourcing methods and principles through a detailed discussion of a diverse set of case studies. The selection of case studies focuses on challenging settings where crowdworkers are asked to write original text or otherwise perform relatively unconstrained work. Through these case studies, we discuss in detail processes that were carefully designed to achieve data with specific properties, for example to require logical inference, grounded reasoning or conversational understanding. Each case study focuses on data collection crowdsourcing protocol details that often receive limited attention in research presentations, for example in conferences, but are critical for research success.

We study the task of cross-database semantic parsing (XSP), where a system that maps natural language utterances to executable SQL queries is evaluated on databases unseen during training. Recently, several datasets, including Spider, were proposed to support development of XSP systems. We propose a challenging evaluation setup for cross-database semantic parsing, focusing on variation across database schemas and in-domain language use. We re-purpose eight semantic parsing datasets that have been well-studied in the setting where in-domain training data is available, and instead use them as additional evaluation data for XSP systems instead. We build a system that performs well on Spider, and find that it struggles to generalize to our re-purposed set. Our setup uncovers several generalization challenges for cross-database semantic parsing, demonstrating the need to use and develop diverse training and evaluation datasets.

We study a collaborative scenario where a user not only instructs a system to complete tasks, but also acts alongside it. This allows the user to adapt to the system abilities by changing their language or deciding to simply accomplish some tasks themselves, and requires the system to effectively recover from errors as the user strategically assigns it new goals. We build a game environment to study this scenario, and learn to map user instructions to system actions. We introduce a learning approach focused on recovery from cascading errors between instructions, and modeling methods to explicitly reason about instructions with multiple goals. We evaluate with a new evaluation protocol using recorded interactions and online games with human users, and observe how users adapt to the system abilities.

We introduce a new dataset for joint reasoning about natural language and images, with a focus on semantic diversity, compositionality, and visual reasoning challenges. The data contains 107,292 examples of English sentences paired with web photographs. The task is to determine whether a natural language caption is true about a pair of photographs. We crowdsource the data using sets of visually rich images and a compare-and-contrast task to elicit linguistically diverse language. Qualitative analysis shows the data requires compositional joint reasoning, including about quantities, comparisons, and relations. Evaluation using state-of-the-art visual reasoning methods shows the data presents a strong challenge.

We propose a context-dependent model to map utterances within an interaction to executable formal queries. To incorporate interaction history, the model maintains an interaction-level encoder that updates after each turn, and can copy sub-sequences of previously predicted queries during generation. Our approach combines implicit and explicit modeling of references between utterances. We evaluate our model on the ATIS flight planning interactions, and demonstrate the benefits of modeling context and explicit references.

We propose a learning approach for mapping context-dependent sequential instructions to actions. We address the problem of discourse and state dependencies with an attention-based model that considers both the history of the interaction and the state of the world. To train from start and goal states without access to demonstrations, we propose SESTRA, a learning algorithm that takes advantage of single-step reward observations and immediate expected reward maximization. We evaluate on the SCONE domains, and show absolute accuracy improvements of 9.8%-25.3% across the domains over approaches that use high-level logical representations.

Semantic parsing, the study of translating natural language utterances into machine-executable programs, is a well-established research area and has applications in question answering, instruction following, voice assistants, and code generation. In the last two years, the models used for semantic parsing have changed dramatically with the introduction of neural encoder-decoder methods that allow us to rethink many of the previous assumptions underlying semantic parsing. We aim to inform those already interested in semantic parsing research of these new developments in the field, as well as introduce the topic as an exciting research area to those who are unfamiliar with it. Current approaches for neural semantic parsing share several similarities with neural machine translation, but the key difference between the two fields is that semantic parsing translates natural language into a formal language, while machine translation translates it into a different natural language. The formal language used in semantic parsing allows for constrained decoding, where the model is constrained to only produce outputs that are valid formal statements. We will describe the various approaches researchers have taken to do this. We will also discuss the choice of formal languages used by semantic parsers, and describe why much recent work has chosen to use standard programming languages instead of more linguistically-motivated representations. We will then describe a particularly challenging setting for semantic parsing, where there is additional context or interaction that the parser must take into account when translating natural language to formal language, and give an overview of recent work in this direction. Finally, we will introduce some tools available in AllenNLP for doing semantic parsing research.

We present a new visual reasoning language dataset, containing 92,244 pairs of examples of natural statements grounded in synthetic images with 3,962 unique sentences. We describe a method of crowdsourcing linguistically-diverse data, and present an analysis of our data. The data demonstrates a broad set of linguistic phenomena, requiring visual and set-theoretic reasoning. We experiment with various models, and show the data presents a strong challenge for future research.