Research - Papers
Explore a selection of our published work on a variety of key research challenges in AI.
Everything Happens for a Reason: Discovering the Purpose of Actions in Procedural Text
Our goal is to better comprehend procedural text, e.g., a paragraph about photosynthesis, by not only predicting what happens, but why some actions need to happen before others. Our approach builds…
“Going on a vacation” takes longer than “Going for a walk”: A Study of Temporal Commonsense Understanding
Understanding time is crucial for understanding events expressed in natural language. Because people rarely say the obvious, it is often necessary to have commonsense knowledge about various…
Pretrained Language Models for Sequential Sentence Classification
As a step toward better document-level understanding, we explore classification of a sequence of sentences into their corresponding categories, a task that requires understanding sentences in…
QuaRTz: An Open-Domain Dataset of Qualitative Relationship Questions
We introduce the first open-domain dataset, called QuaRTz, for reasoning about textual qualitative relationships. QuaRTz contains general qualitative statements, e.g., "A sunscreen with a higher SPF…
WIQA: A dataset for "What if..." reasoning over procedural text
We introduce WIQA, the first large-scale dataset of "What if..." questions over procedural text. WIQA contains three parts: a collection of paragraphs each describing a process, e.g., beach erosion;…
Exploiting Explicit Paths for Multi-hop Reading Comprehension
We propose a novel, path-based reasoning approach for the multi-hop reading comprehension task where a system needs to combine facts from multiple passages to answer a question. Although inspired by…
Be Consistent! Improving Procedural Text Comprehension using Label Consistency
Our goal is procedural text comprehension, namely tracking how the properties of entities (e.g., their location) change with time given a procedural text (e.g., a paragraph about photosynthesis, a…
Repurposing Entailment for Multi-Hop Question Answering Tasks
Question Answering (QA) naturally reduces to an entailment problem, namely, verifying whether some text entails the answer to a question. However, for multi-hop QA tasks, which require reasoning…
Declarative Question Answering over Knowledge Bases containing Natural Language Text with Answer Set Programming
While in recent years machine learning (ML) based approaches have been the popular approach in developing end-to-end question answering systems, such systems often struggle when additional knowledge…
QASC: A Dataset for Question Answering via Sentence Composition
Composing knowledge from multiple pieces of texts is a key challenge in multi-hop question answering. We present a multi-hop reasoning dataset, Question Answering via Sentence Composition (QASC),…