Breakpoint Transformers for Modeling and Tracking Intermediate Beliefs

Kyle Richardson, Ronen Tamari, Oren Sultan, Dafna Shahaf, Reut Tsarfaty, Ashish Sabharwal


Abstract
Can we teach models designed for language understanding tasks to track and improve their beliefs through intermediate points in text? Besides making their inner workings more transparent, this would also help make models more reliable and consistent. To this end, we propose a representation learning framework called breakpoint modeling that allows for efficient and robust learning of this type. Given any text encoder and data marked with intermediate states (breakpoints) along with corresponding textual queries viewed as true/false propositions (i.e., the candidate intermediate beliefs of a model), our approach trains models in an efficient and end-to-end fashion to build intermediate representations that facilitate direct querying and training of beliefs at arbitrary points in text, alongside solving other end-tasks. We evaluate breakpoint modeling on a diverse set of NLU tasks including relation reasoning on Cluttr and narrative understanding on bAbI. Using novel proposition prediction tasks alongside these end-tasks, we show the benefit of our T5-based breakpoint transformer over strong conventional representation learning approaches in terms of processing efficiency, belief accuracy, and belief consistency, all with minimal to no degradation on the end-task. To show the feasibility of incorporating our belief tracker into more complex reasoning pipelines, we also obtain state-of-the-art performance on the three-tiered reasoning challenge for the recent TRIP benchmark (23-32% absolute improvement on Tasks 2-3).
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.658
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9703–9719
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.658
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.658
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kyle Richardson, Ronen Tamari, Oren Sultan, Dafna Shahaf, Reut Tsarfaty, and Ashish Sabharwal. 2022. Breakpoint Transformers for Modeling and Tracking Intermediate Beliefs. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9703–9719, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Breakpoint Transformers for Modeling and Tracking Intermediate Beliefs (Richardson et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.658.pdf