Research - Papers
Explore a selection of our published work on a variety of key research challenges in AI.
It's not Rocket Science : Interpreting Figurative Language in Narratives
Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on compositionality, while figurative…
Question Decomposition with Dependency Graphs
QDMR is a meaning representation for complex questions, which decomposes questions into a sequence of atomic steps. While stateof-the-art QDMR parsers use the common sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq)…
All That’s ‘Human’ Is Not Gold: Evaluating Human Evaluation of Generated Text
Human evaluations are typically considered the gold standard in natural language generation, but as models' fluency improves, how well can evaluators detect and judge machine-generated text? We run…
Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategies
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…
Edited Media Understanding Frames: Reasoning about the Intent and Implications of Visual Disinformation
Multimodal disinformation, from `deepfakes' to simple edits that deceive, is an important societal problem. Yet at the same time, the vast majority of media edits are harmless -- such as a filtered…
Effective Attention Sheds Light On Interpretability
An attention matrix of a transformer selfattention sublayer can provably be decomposed into two components and only one of them (effective attention) contributes to the model output. This leads us…
Explaining NLP Models via Minimal Contrastive Editing (MiCE)
Humans give contrastive explanations that explain why an observed event happened rather than some other counterfactual event (the contrast case). Despite the important role that contrastivity plays…
Explaining Relationships Between Scientific Documents
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…
Few-Shot Question Answering by Pretraining Span Selection
In a number of question answering (QA) benchmarks, pretrained models have reached human parity through fine-tuning on an order of 100,000 annotated questions and answers. We explore the more…
How effective is BERT without word ordering? Implications for language understanding and data privacy
Ordered word sequences contain the rich structures that define language. However, it’s often not clear if or how modern pretrained language models utilize these structures. We show that the token…