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Recent breakthroughs of pretrained language models have shown the effectiveness of self-supervised learning for a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In addition to standard syntactic and semantic NLP tasks, pretrained…

Language model (LM) pre-training is useful in many language processing tasks. But can pre-trained LMs be further leveraged for more general machine learning problems? We propose an approach for using LMs to scaffold learning and…

Pre-trained Text-to-Text Language Models (LMs), such as T5 or BART yield promising results in the Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) task. However, the capacity of the models is limited and the quality decreases for questions with…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance in question answering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), yet they implicitly assume that user queries are fully specified and answerable. In real-world settings, queries…

A fundamental ability of humans is to utilize commonsense knowledge in language understanding and question answering. In recent years, many knowledge-enhanced Commonsense Question Answering (CQA) approaches have been proposed. However, it…

Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is a key competence of performant transformer language models that is tested by mainstream benchmarks. However, recent evidence shows that models can have quite a range of performance, particularly…

We present an approach called Q-probing to adapt a pre-trained language model to maximize a task-specific reward function. At a high level, Q-probing sits between heavier approaches such as finetuning and lighter approaches such as few shot…

In this paper, we study how the intrinsic nature of pre-training data contributes to the fine-tuned downstream performance. To this end, we pre-train different transformer-based masked language models on several corpora with certain…

Successful methods for unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) employ crosslingual pretraining via self-supervision, often in the form of a masked language modeling or a sequence generation task, which requires the model to align the…

Conversational question answering (QA) requires the ability to correctly interpret a question in the context of previous conversation turns. We address the conversational QA task by decomposing it into question rewriting and question…

Open-domain Question Answering (OpenQA) aims at answering factual questions with an external large-scale knowledge corpus. However, real-world knowledge is not static; it updates and evolves continually. Such a dynamic characteristic of…

We show that the task of question answering (QA) can significantly benefit from the transfer learning of models trained on a different large, fine-grained QA dataset. We achieve the state of the art in two well-studied QA datasets, WikiQA…

Current methods in open-domain question answering (QA) usually employ a pipeline of first retrieving relevant documents, then applying strong reading comprehension (RC) models to that retrieved text. However, modern RC models are complex…

We consider the problem of Embodied Question Answering (EQA), which refers to settings where an embodied agent such as a robot needs to actively explore an environment to gather information until it is confident about the answer to a…

Prior work on multilingual question answering has mostly focused on using large multilingual pre-trained language models (LM) to perform zero-shot language-wise learning: train a QA model on English and test on other languages. In this…

Recent work has suggested that language models (LMs) store both common-sense and factual knowledge learned from pre-training data. In this paper, we leverage this implicit knowledge to create an effective end-to-end fact checker using a…

In open question answering (QA), the answer to a question is produced by retrieving and then analyzing documents that might contain answers to the question. Most open QA systems have considered only retrieving information from unstructured…

Masked language modeling (MLM) has been widely used for pre-training effective bidirectional representations, but incurs substantial training costs. In this paper, we propose a novel concept-based curriculum masking (CCM) method to…

Knowledge tracing (KT) defines the task of predicting whether students can correctly answer questions based on their historical response. Although much research has been devoted to exploiting the question information, plentiful advanced…

This paper proposes a novel training method to improve the robustness of Extractive Question Answering (EQA) models. Previous research has shown that existing models, when trained on EQA datasets that include unanswerable questions,…