Abstract:Inferences from adjective-noun combinations like "Is artificial intelligence still intelligence?" provide a good test bed for LLMs' understanding of meaning and compositional generalization capability, since there are many combinations which are novel to both humans and LLMs but nevertheless elicit convergent human judgments. We study a range of LLMs and find that the largest models we tested are able to draw human-like inferences when the inference is determined by context and can generalize to unseen adjective-noun combinations. We also propose three methods to evaluate LLMs on these inferences out of context, where there is a distribution of human-like answers rather than a single correct answer. We find that LLMs show a human-like distribution on at most 75\% of our dataset, which is promising but still leaves room for improvement.
Abstract:Large, pre-trained transformer-based language models such as BERT have drastically changed the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. We present a survey of recent work that uses these large language models to solve NLP tasks via pre-training then fine-tuning, prompting, or text generation approaches. We also present approaches that use pre-trained language models to generate data for training augmentation or other purposes. We conclude with discussions on limitations and suggested directions for future research.
Abstract:Extracting temporal relations between events and time expressions has many applications such as constructing event timelines and time-related question answering. It is a challenging problem that requires syntactic and semantic information at sentence or discourse levels, which may be captured by deep language models such as BERT (Devlin et al., 2019). In this paper, we developed several variants of BERT-based temporal dependency parser, and show that BERT significantly improves temporal dependency parsing (Zhang and Xue,2018a). Source code and trained models will be made available at github.com.