ARISTO

A key limitation in current datasets for multi-hop reasoning is that the required steps for answering the question are mentioned in it explicitly. In this work, we introduce STRATEGYQA, a question answering (QA) benchmark where the required reasoning steps are implicit in the question, and should be inferred using a strategy. A fundamental challenge in this setup is how to elicit such creative questions from crowdsourcing workers, while covering a broad range of potential strategies. We propose a data collection procedure that combines term-based priming to inspire annotators, careful control over the annotator population, and adversarial filtering for eliminating reasoning shortcuts. Moreover, we annotate each question with (1) a decomposition into reasoning steps for answering it, and (2) Wikipedia paragraphs that contain the answers to each step. Overall, STRATEGYQA includes 2,780 examples, each consisting of a strategy question, its decomposition, and evidence paragraphs. Analysis shows that questions in STRATEGYQA are short, topicdiverse, and cover a wide range of strategies. Empirically, we show that humans perform well (87%) on this task, while our best baseline reaches an accuracy of ∼ 66%

Transformers have been shown to emulate logical deduction over natural language theories (logical rules expressed in natural language), reliably assigning true/false labels to candidate implications. However, their ability to generate implications of a theory has not yet been demonstrated, and methods for reconstructing proofs of answers are imperfect. In this work we show that a generative model, called ProofWriter, can reliably generate both implications of a theory and the natural language proof(s) that support them. In particular, iterating a 1-step implication generator results in proofs that are highly reliable, and represent actual model decisions (rather than post-hoc rationalizations). On the RuleTaker dataset, the accuracy of ProofWriter’s proofs exceed previous methods by +9% absolute, and in a way that generalizes to proof depths unseen in training and on out-of-domain problems. We also show that generative techniques can perform a type of abduction with high precision: Given a theory and an unprovable conclusion, identify a missing fact that allows the conclusion to be proved, along with a proof. These results significantly improve the viability of neural methods for systematically reasoning over natural language.

Despite the progress made in recent years in addressing natural language understanding (NLU) challenges, the majority of this progress remains to be concentrated on resource-rich languages like English. This work focuses on Persian language, one of the widely spoken languages in the world, and yet there are few NLU datasets available for this rich language. The availability of high-quality evaluation datasets is a necessity for reliable assessment of the progress on different NLU tasks and domains. We introduce ParsiNLU, the first benchmark in Persian language that includes a range of high-level tasks -- Reading Comprehension, Textual Entailment, etc. These datasets are collected in a multitude of ways, often involving manual annotations by native speakers. This results in over 14.5$k$ new instances across 6 distinct NLU tasks. Besides, we present the first results on state-of-the-art monolingual and multi-lingual pre-trained language-models on this benchmark and compare them with human performance, which provides valuable insights into our ability to tackle natural language understanding challenges in Persian. We hope ParsiNLU fosters further research and advances in Persian language understanding.

This paper takes a first step towards a critical thinking curriculum for neural auto-regressive language models. We introduce a synthetic text corpus of deductively valid arguments, and use this artificial argument corpus to train and evaluate GPT-2. Significant transfer learning effects can be observed: Training a model on a few simple core schemes allows it to accurately complete conclusions of different, and more complex types of arguments, too. The language models seem to connect and generalize the core argument schemes in a correct way. Moreover, we obtain consistent and promising results for the GLUE and SNLI benchmarks. The findings suggest that there might exist a representative sample of paradigmatic instances of good reasoning that will suffice to acquire general reasoning skills and that might form the core of a critical thinking curriculum for language models.