Rik Koncel-Kedziorski

Also published as: R. Koncel-Kedziorski


2023

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SQUARE: Automatic Question Answering Evaluation using Multiple Positive and Negative References
Matteo Gabburo | Siddhant Garg | Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Alessandro Moschitti
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

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Learning Answer Generation using Supervision from Automatic Question Answering Evaluators
Matteo Gabburo | Siddhant Garg | Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Alessandro Moschitti
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent studies show that sentence-level extractive QA, i.e., based on Answer Sentence Selection (AS2), is outperformed by Generation-based QA (GenQA) models, which generate answers using the top-k answer sentences ranked by AS2 models (a la retrieval-augmented generation style). In this paper, we propose a novel training paradigm for GenQA using supervision from automatic QA evaluation models (GAVA). Specifically, we propose three strategies to transfer knowledge from these QA evaluation models to a GenQA model: (i) augmenting training data with answers generated by the GenQA model and labelled by GAVA (either statically, before training, or (ii) dynamically, at every training epoch); and (iii) using the GAVA score for weighting the generator loss during the learning of the GenQA model. We evaluate our proposed methods on two academic and one industrial dataset, obtaining a significant improvement in answering accuracy over the previous state of the art.

2022

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Cross-Lingual Open-Domain Question Answering with Answer Sentence Generation
Benjamin Muller | Luca Soldaini | Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Eric Lind | Alessandro Moschitti
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Open-Domain Generative Question Answering has achieved impressive performance in English by combining document-level retrieval with answer generation. These approaches, which we refer to as GenQA, can generate complete sentences, effectively answering both factoid and non-factoid questions. In this paper, we extend to the multilingual and cross-lingual settings. For this purpose, we first introduce GenTyDiQA, an extension of the TyDiQA dataset with well-formed and complete answers for Arabic, Bengali, English, Japanese, and Russian. Based on GenTyDiQA, we design a cross-lingual generative model that produces full-sentence answers by exploiting passages written in multiple languages, including languages different from the question. Our cross-lingual generative system outperforms answer sentence selection baselines for all 5 languages and monolingual generative pipelines for three out of five languages studied.

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Is GPT-3 Text Indistinguishable from Human Text? Scarecrow: A Framework for Scrutinizing Machine Text
Yao Dou | Maxwell Forbes | Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Noah A. Smith | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Modern neural language models can produce remarkably fluent and grammatical text. So much, in fact, that recent work by Clark et al. (2021) has reported that conventional crowdsourcing can no longer reliably distinguish between machine-authored (GPT-3) and human-authored writing. As errors in machine generations become ever subtler and harder to spot, it poses a new challenge to the research community for robust machine text evaluation. We propose a new framework called Scarecrow for scrutinizing machine text via crowd annotation. To support the broad range of real machine errors that can be identified by laypeople, the ten error categories of Scarecrow—such as redundancy, commonsense errors, and incoherence—are identified through several rounds of crowd annotation experiments without a predefined ontology. We then use Scarecrow to collect over 41k error spans in human-written and machine-generated paragraphs of English language news text. We isolate factors for detailed analysis, including parameter count, training data, and various decoding-time configurations. Our approach successfully quantifies measurable gaps between human authored text and generations from models of several sizes, including fourteen configurations of GPT-3. In addition, our analysis unveils new insights, with detailed rationales provided by laypeople, e.g., that the commonsense capabilities have been improving with larger models while math capabilities have not, and that the choices of simple decoding hyperparameters can make remarkable differences on the perceived quality of machine text. We release our training material, annotation toolkit and dataset at https://yao-dou.github.io/scarecrow/.

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Extracting and Inferring Personal Attributes from Dialogue
Zhilin Wang | Xuhui Zhou | Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Alex Marin | Fei Xia
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI

Personal attributes represent structured information about a person, such as their hobbies, pets, family, likes and dislikes. We introduce the tasks of extracting and inferring personal attributes from human-human dialogue, and analyze the linguistic demands of these tasks. To meet these challenges, we introduce a simple and extensible model that combines an autoregressive language model utilizing constrained attribute generation with a discriminative reranker. Our model outperforms strong baselines on extracting personal attributes as well as inferring personal attributes that are not contained verbatim in utterances and instead requires commonsense reasoning and lexical inferences, which occur frequently in everyday conversation. Finally, we demonstrate the benefit of incorporating personal attributes in social chit-chat and task-oriented dialogue settings.

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Knowledge Transfer from Answer Ranking to Answer Generation
Matteo Gabburo | Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Siddhant Garg | Luca Soldaini | Alessandro Moschitti
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent studies show that Question Answering (QA) based on Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) can be improved by generating an improved answer from the top-k ranked answer sentences (termed GenQA). This allows for synthesizing the information from multiple candidates into a concise, natural-sounding answer. However, creating large-scale supervised training data for GenQA models is very challenging. In this paper, we propose to train a GenQA model by transferring knowledge from a trained AS2 model, to overcome the aforementioned issue. First, we use an AS2 model to produce a ranking over answer candidates for a set of questions. Then, we use the top ranked candidate as the generation target, and the next k top ranked candidates as context for training a GenQA model. We also propose to use the AS2 model prediction scores for loss weighting and score-conditioned input/output shaping, to aid the knowledge transfer. Our evaluation on three public and one large industrial datasets demonstrates the superiority of our approach over the AS2 baseline, and GenQA trained using supervised data.

2021

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Explaining Relationships Between Scientific Documents
Kelvin Luu | Xinyi Wu | Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Kyle Lo | Isabel Cachola | Noah A. Smith
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We address the task of explaining relationships between two scientific documents using natural language text. This task requires modeling the complex content of long technical documents, deducing a relationship between these documents, and expressing the details of that relationship in text. In addition to the theoretical interest of this task, successful solutions can help improve researcher efficiency in search and review. In this paper we establish a dataset of 622K examples from 154K documents. We pretrain a large language model to serve as the foundation for autoregressive approaches to the task. We explore the impact of taking different views on the two documents, including the use of dense representations extracted with scientific IE systems. We provide extensive automatic and human evaluations which show the promise of such models, but make clear challenges for future work.

2019

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SemEval-2019 Task 10: Math Question Answering
Mark Hopkins | Ronan Le Bras | Cristian Petrescu-Prahova | Gabriel Stanovsky | Hannaneh Hajishirzi | Rik Koncel-Kedziorski
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

We report on the SemEval 2019 task on math question answering. We provided a question set derived from Math SAT practice exams, including 2778 training questions and 1082 test questions. For a significant subset of these questions, we also provided SMT-LIB logical form annotations and an interpreter that could solve these logical forms. Systems were evaluated based on the percentage of correctly answered questions. The top system correctly answered 45% of the test questions, a considerable improvement over the 17% random guessing baseline.

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Text Generation from Knowledge Graphs with Graph Transformers
Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Dhanush Bekal | Yi Luan | Mirella Lapata | Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Generating texts which express complex ideas spanning multiple sentences requires a structured representation of their content (document plan), but these representations are prohibitively expensive to manually produce. In this work, we address the problem of generating coherent multi-sentence texts from the output of an information extraction system, and in particular a knowledge graph. Graphical knowledge representations are ubiquitous in computing, but pose a significant challenge for text generation techniques due to their non-hierarchical nature, collapsing of long-distance dependencies, and structural variety. We introduce a novel graph transforming encoder which can leverage the relational structure of such knowledge graphs without imposing linearization or hierarchical constraints. Incorporated into an encoder-decoder setup, we provide an end-to-end trainable system for graph-to-text generation that we apply to the domain of scientific text. Automatic and human evaluations show that our technique produces more informative texts which exhibit better document structure than competitive encoder-decoder methods.

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MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms
Aida Amini | Saadia Gabriel | Shanchuan Lin | Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Yejin Choi | Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

We introduce a large-scale dataset of math word problems and an interpretable neural math problem solver by learning to map problems to their operation programs. Due to annotation challenges, current datasets in this domain have been either relatively small in scale or did not offer precise operational annotations over diverse problem types. We introduce a new representation language to model operation programs corresponding to each math problem that aim to improve both the performance and the interpretability of the learned models. Using this representation language, we significantly enhance the AQUA-RAT dataset with fully-specified operational programs. We additionally introduce a neural sequence-to-program model with automatic problem categorization. Our experiments show improvements over competitive baselines in our dataset as well as the AQUA-RAT dataset. The results are still lower than human performance indicating that the dataset poses new challenges for future research. Our dataset is available at https://math-qa.github.io/math-QA/

2018

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Pyramidal Recurrent Unit for Language Modeling
Sachin Mehta | Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Mohammad Rastegari | Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

LSTMs are powerful tools for modeling contextual information, as evidenced by their success at the task of language modeling. However, modeling contexts in very high dimensional space can lead to poor generalizability. We introduce the Pyramidal Recurrent Unit (PRU), which enables learning representations in high dimensional space with more generalization power and fewer parameters. PRUs replace the linear transformation in LSTMs with more sophisticated interactions such as pyramidal or grouped linear transformations. This architecture gives strong results on word-level language modeling while reducing parameters significantly. In particular, PRU improves the perplexity of a recent state-of-the-art language model by up to 1.3 points while learning 15-20% fewer parameters. For similar number of model parameters, PRU outperforms all previous RNN models that exploit different gating mechanisms and transformations. We provide a detailed examination of the PRU and its behavior on the language modeling tasks. Our code is open-source and available at https://sacmehta.github.io/PRU/.

2016

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Phonological Pun-derstanding
Aaron Jaech | Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Mari Ostendorf
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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MAWPS: A Math Word Problem Repository
Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Subhro Roy | Aida Amini | Nate Kushman | Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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A Theme-Rewriting Approach for Generating Algebra Word Problems
Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Ioannis Konstas | Luke Zettlemoyer | Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2015

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Parsing Algebraic Word Problems into Equations
Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Hannaneh Hajishirzi | Ashish Sabharwal | Oren Etzioni | Siena Dumas Ang
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 3

This paper formalizes the problem of solving multi-sentence algebraic word problems as that of generating and scoring equation trees. We use integer linear programming to generate equation trees and score their likelihood by learning local and global discriminative models. These models are trained on a small set of word problems and their answers, without any manual annotation, in order to choose the equation that best matches the problem text. We refer to the overall system as Alges. We compare Alges with previous work and show that it covers the full gamut of arithmetic operations whereas Hosseini et al. (2014) only handle addition and subtraction. In addition, Alges overcomes the brittleness of the Kushman et al. (2014) approach on single-equation problems, yielding a 15% to 50% reduction in error.

2014

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Multi-Resolution Language Grounding with Weak Supervision
R. Koncel-Kedziorski | Hannaneh Hajishirzi | Ali Farhadi
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)