Pavan Kapanipathi


2024

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API-BLEND: A Comprehensive Corpora for Training and Benchmarking API LLMs
Kinjal Basu | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Subhajit Chaudhury | Soham Dan | Maxwell Crouse | Asim Munawar | Vernon Austel | Sadhana Kumaravel | Vinod Muthusamy | Pavan Kapanipathi | Luis Lastras
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

There is a growing need for Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively use tools and external Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to plan and complete tasks. As such, there is tremendous interest in methods that can acquire sufficient quantities of train and test data that involve calls to tools / APIs. Two lines of research have emerged as the predominant strategies for addressing this challenge. The first has focused on synthetic data generation techniques, while the second has involved curating task-adjacent datasets which can be transformed into API / Tool-based tasks. In this paper, we focus on the task of identifying, curating, and transforming existing datasets and, in turn, introduce API-BLEND, a large corpora for training and systematic testing of tool-augmented LLMs. The datasets mimic real-world scenarios involving API-tasks such as API / tool detection, slot filling, and sequencing of the detected APIs. We demonstrate the utility of the API-BLEND dataset for both training and benchmarking purposes.

2023

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MISMATCH: Fine-grained Evaluation of Machine-generated Text with Mismatch Error Types
Keerthiram Murugesan | Sarathkrishna Swaminathan | Soham Dan | Subhajit Chaudhury | Chulaka Gunasekara | Maxwell Crouse | Diwakar Mahajan | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Achille Fokoue | Pavan Kapanipathi | Salim Roukos | Alexander Gray
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

With the growing interest in large language models, the need for evaluating the quality of machine text compared to reference (typically human-generated) text has become focal attention. Most recent works focus either on task-specific evaluation metrics or study the properties of machine-generated text captured by the existing metrics. In this work, we propose a new evaluation scheme to model human judgments in 7 NLP tasks, based on the fine-grained mismatches between a pair of texts. Inspired by the recent efforts in several NLP tasks for fine-grained evaluation, we introduce a set of 13 mismatch error types such as spatial/geographic errors, entity errors, etc, to guide the model for better prediction of human judgments. We propose a neural framework for evaluating machine texts that uses these mismatch error types as auxiliary tasks and re-purposes the existing single-number evaluation metrics as additional scalar features, in addition to textual features extracted from the machine and reference texts. Our experiments reveal key insights about the existing metrics via the mismatch errors. We show that the mismatch errors between the sentence pairs on the held-out datasets from 7 NLP tasks align well with the human evaluation.

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Self-Supervised Rule Learning to Link Text Segments to Relational Elements of Structured Knowledge
Shajith Ikbal | Udit Sharma | Hima Karanam | Sumit Neelam | Ronny Luss | Dheeraj Sreedhar | Pavan Kapanipathi | Naweed Khan | Kyle Erwin | Ndivhuwo Makondo | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Achille Fokoue | Alexander Gray | Maxwell Crouse | Subhajit Chaudhury | Chitra Subramanian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

We present a neuro-symbolic approach to self-learn rules that serve as interpretable knowledge to perform relation linking in knowledge base question answering systems. These rules define natural language text predicates as a weighted mixture of knowledge base paths. The weights learned during training effectively serve the mapping needed to perform relation linking. We use popular masked training strategy to self-learn the rules. A key distinguishing aspect of our work is that the masked training operate over logical forms of the sentence instead of their natural language text form. This offers opportunity to extract extended context information from the structured knowledge source and use that to build robust and human readable rules. We evaluate accuracy and usefulness of such learned rules by utilizing them for prediction of missing kinship relation in CLUTRR dataset and relation linking in a KBQA system using SWQ-WD dataset. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach - its generalizability, interpretability and ability to achieve an average performance gain of 17% on CLUTRR dataset.

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Learning Symbolic Rules over Abstract Meaning Representations for Textual Reinforcement Learning
Subhajit Chaudhury | Sarathkrishna Swaminathan | Daiki Kimura | Prithviraj Sen | Keerthiram Murugesan | Rosario Uceda-Sosa | Michiaki Tatsubori | Achille Fokoue | Pavan Kapanipathi | Asim Munawar | Alexander Gray
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Text-based reinforcement learning agents have predominantly been neural network-based models with embeddings-based representation, learning uninterpretable policies that often do not generalize well to unseen games. On the other hand, neuro-symbolic methods, specifically those that leverage an intermediate formal representation, are gaining significant attention in language understanding tasks. This is because of their advantages ranging from inherent interpretability, the lesser requirement of training data, and being generalizable in scenarios with unseen data. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a modular, NEuro-Symbolic Textual Agent (NESTA) that combines a generic semantic parser with a rule induction system to learn abstract interpretable rules as policies. Our experiments on established text-based game benchmarks show that the proposed NESTA method outperforms deep reinforcement learning-based techniques by achieving better generalization to unseen test games and learning from fewer training interactions.

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Laziness Is a Virtue When It Comes to Compositionality in Neural Semantic Parsing
Maxwell Crouse | Pavan Kapanipathi | Subhajit Chaudhury | Tahira Naseem | Ramon Fernandez Astudillo | Achille Fokoue | Tim Klinger
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Nearly all general-purpose neural semantic parsers generate logical forms in a strictly top-down autoregressive fashion. Though such systems have achieved impressive results across a variety of datasets and domains, recent works have called into question whether they are ultimately limited in their ability to compositionally generalize. In this work, we approach semantic parsing from, quite literally, the opposite direction; that is, we introduce a neural semantic parsing generation method that constructs logical forms from the bottom up, beginning from the logical form’s leaves. The system we introduce is lazy in that it incrementally builds up a set of potential semantic parses, but only expands and processes the most promising candidate parses at each generation step. Such a parsimonious expansion scheme allows the system to maintain an arbitrarily large set of parse hypotheses that are never realized and thus incur minimal computational overhead. We evaluate our approach on compositional generalization; specifically, on the challenging CFQ dataset and two other Text-to-SQL datasets where we show that our novel, bottom-up semantic parsing technique outperforms general-purpose semantic parsers while also being competitive with semantic parsers that have been tailored to each task.

2022

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Logical Neural Networks for Knowledge Base Completion with Embeddings & Rules
Prithviraj Sen | Breno William Carvalho | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Pavan Kapanipathi | Salim Roukos | Alexander Gray
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Knowledge base completion (KBC) has benefitted greatly by learning explainable rules in an human-interpretable dialect such as first-order logic. Rule-based KBC has so far, mainly focussed on learning one of two types of rules: conjunction-of-disjunctions and disjunction-of-conjunctions. We qualitatively show, via examples, that one of these has an advantage over the other when it comes to achieving high quality KBC. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose learning both kinds of rules within a common framework. To this end, we propose to utilize logical neural networks (LNN), a powerful neuro-symbolic AI framework that can express both kinds of rules and learn these end-to-end using gradient-based optimization. Our in-depth experiments show that our LNN-based approach to learning rules for KBC leads to roughly 10% relative improvements, if not more, over SotA rule-based KBC methods. Moreover, by showing how to combine our proposed methods with knowledge graph embeddings we further achieve an additional 7.5% relative improvement.

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X-FACTOR: A Cross-metric Evaluation of Factual Correctness in Abstractive Summarization
Subhajit Chaudhury | Sarathkrishna Swaminathan | Chulaka Gunasekara | Maxwell Crouse | Srinivas Ravishankar | Daiki Kimura | Keerthiram Murugesan | Ramón Fernandez Astudillo | Tahira Naseem | Pavan Kapanipathi | Alexander Gray
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Abstractive summarization models often produce factually inconsistent summaries that are not supported by the original article. Recently, a number of fact-consistent evaluation techniques have been proposed to address this issue; however, a detailed analysis of how these metrics agree with one another has yet to be conducted. In this paper, we present X-FACTOR, a cross-evaluation of three high-performing fact-aware abstractive summarization methods. First, we show that summarization models are often fine-tuned on datasets that contain factually inconsistent summaries and propose a fact-aware filtering mechanism that improves the quality of training data and, consequently, the factuality of these models. Second, we propose a corrector module that can be used to improve the factual consistency of generated summaries. Third, we present a re-ranking technique that samples summary instances from the output distribution of a summarization model and re-ranks the sampled instances based on their factuality. Finally, we provide a detailed cross-metric agreement analysis that shows how tuning a model to output summaries based on a particular factuality metric influences factuality as determined by the other metrics. Our goal in this work is to facilitate research that improves the factuality and faithfulness of abstractive summarization models.

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Zero-shot Entity Linking with Less Data
G P Shrivatsa Bhargav | Dinesh Khandelwal | Saswati Dana | Dinesh Garg | Pavan Kapanipathi | Salim Roukos | Alexander Gray | L Venkata Subramaniam
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Entity Linking (EL) maps an entity mention in a natural language sentence to an entity in a knowledge base (KB). The Zero-shot Entity Linking (ZEL) extends the scope of EL to unseen entities at the test time without requiring new labeled data. BLINK (BERT-based) is one of the SOTA models for ZEL. Interestingly, we discovered that BLINK exhibits diminishing returns, i.e., it reaches 98% of its performance with just 1% of the training data and the remaining 99% of the data yields only a marginal increase of 2% in the performance. While this extra 2% gain makes a huge difference for downstream tasks, training BLINK on large amounts of data is very resource-intensive and impractical. In this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic, multi-task learning approach to bridge this gap. Our approach boosts the BLINK’s performance with much less data by exploiting an auxiliary information about entity types. Specifically, we train our model on two tasks simultaneously - entity linking (primary task) and hierarchical entity type prediction (auxiliary task). The auxiliary task exploits the hierarchical structure of entity types. Our approach achieves superior performance on ZEL task with significantly less training data. On four different benchmark datasets, we show that our approach achieves significantly higher performance than SOTA models when they are trained with just 0.01%, 0.1%, or 1% of the original training data. Our code is available at https://github.com/IBM/NeSLET.

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SYGMA: A System for Generalizable and Modular Question Answering Over Knowledge Bases
Sumit Neelam | Udit Sharma | Hima Karanam | Shajith Ikbal | Pavan Kapanipathi | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Nandana Mihindukulasooriya | Young-Suk Lee | Santosh Srivastava | Cezar Pendus | Saswati Dana | Dinesh Garg | Achille Fokoue | G P Shrivatsa Bhargav | Dinesh Khandelwal | Srinivas Ravishankar | Sairam Gurajada | Maria Chang | Rosario Uceda-Sosa | Salim Roukos | Alexander Gray | Guilherme Lima | Ryan Riegel | Francois Luus | L V Subramaniam
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) involving complex reasoning is emerging as an important research direction. However, most KBQA systems struggle with generalizability, particularly on two dimensions: (a) across multiple knowledge bases, where existing KBQA approaches are typically tuned to a single knowledge base, and (b) across multiple reasoning types, where majority of datasets and systems have primarily focused on multi-hop reasoning. In this paper, we present SYGMA, a modular KBQA approach developed with goal of generalization across multiple knowledge bases and multiple reasoning types. To facilitate this, SYGMA is designed as two high level modules: 1) KB-agnostic question understanding module that remain common across KBs, and generates logic representation of the question with high level reasoning constructs that are extensible, and 2) KB-specific question mapping and answering module to address the KB-specific aspects of the answer extraction. We evaluated SYGMA on multiple datasets belonging to distinct knowledge bases (DBpedia and Wikidata) and distinct reasoning types (multi-hop and temporal). State-of-the-art or competitive performances achieved on those datasets demonstrate its generalization capability.

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A Two-Stage Approach towards Generalization in Knowledge Base Question Answering
Srinivas Ravishankar | Dung Thai | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Nandana Mihindukulasooriya | Tahira Naseem | Pavan Kapanipathi | Gaetano Rossiello | Achille Fokoue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Most existing approaches for Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) focus on a specific underlying knowledge base either because of inherent assumptions in the approach, or because evaluating it on a different knowledge base requires non-trivial changes. However, many popular knowledge bases share similarities in their underlying schemas that can be leveraged to facilitate generalization across knowledge bases. To achieve this generalization, we introduce a KBQA framework based on a 2-stage architecture that explicitly separates semantic parsing from the knowledge base interaction, facilitating transfer learning across datasets and knowledge graphs. We show that pretraining on datasets with a different underlying knowledge base can nevertheless provide significant performance gains and reduce sample complexity. Our approach achieves comparable or state-of-the-art performance for LC-QuAD (DBpedia), WebQSP (Freebase), SimpleQuestions (Wikidata) and MetaQA (Wikimovies-KG).

2021

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Looking Beyond Sentence-Level Natural Language Inference for Question Answering and Text Summarization
Anshuman Mishra | Dhruvesh Patel | Aparna Vijayakumar | Xiang Lorraine Li | Pavan Kapanipathi | Kartik Talamadupula
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Natural Language Inference (NLI) has garnered significant attention in recent years; however, the promise of applying NLI breakthroughs to other downstream NLP tasks has remained unfulfilled. In this work, we use the multiple-choice reading comprehension (MCRC) and checking factual correctness of textual summarization (CFCS) tasks to investigate potential reasons for this. Our findings show that: (1) the relatively shorter length of premises in traditional NLI datasets is the primary challenge prohibiting usage in downstream applications (which do better with longer contexts); (2) this challenge can be addressed by automatically converting resource-rich reading comprehension datasets into longer-premise NLI datasets; and (3) models trained on the converted, longer-premise datasets outperform those trained using short-premise traditional NLI datasets on downstream tasks primarily due to the difference in premise lengths.

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Leveraging Abstract Meaning Representation for Knowledge Base Question Answering
Pavan Kapanipathi | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Srinivas Ravishankar | Salim Roukos | Alexander Gray | Ramón Fernandez Astudillo | Maria Chang | Cristina Cornelio | Saswati Dana | Achille Fokoue | Dinesh Garg | Alfio Gliozzo | Sairam Gurajada | Hima Karanam | Naweed Khan | Dinesh Khandelwal | Young-Suk Lee | Yunyao Li | Francois Luus | Ndivhuwo Makondo | Nandana Mihindukulasooriya | Tahira Naseem | Sumit Neelam | Lucian Popa | Revanth Gangi Reddy | Ryan Riegel | Gaetano Rossiello | Udit Sharma | G P Shrivatsa Bhargav | Mo Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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A Semantics-aware Transformer Model of Relation Linking for Knowledge Base Question Answering
Tahira Naseem | Srinivas Ravishankar | Nandana Mihindukulasooriya | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Young-Suk Lee | Pavan Kapanipathi | Salim Roukos | Alfio Gliozzo | Alexander Gray
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Relation linking is a crucial component of Knowledge Base Question Answering systems. Existing systems use a wide variety of heuristics, or ensembles of multiple systems, heavily relying on the surface question text. However, the explicit semantic parse of the question is a rich source of relation information that is not taken advantage of. We propose a simple transformer-based neural model for relation linking that leverages the AMR semantic parse of a sentence. Our system significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on 4 popular benchmark datasets. These are based on either DBpedia or Wikidata, demonstrating that our approach is effective across KGs.

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Efficient Text-based Reinforcement Learning by Jointly Leveraging State and Commonsense Graph Representations
Keerthiram Murugesan | Mattia Atzeni | Pavan Kapanipathi | Kartik Talamadupula | Mrinmaya Sachan | Murray Campbell
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Text-based games (TBGs) have emerged as useful benchmarks for evaluating progress at the intersection of grounded language understanding and reinforcement learning (RL). Recent work has proposed the use of external knowledge to improve the efficiency of RL agents for TBGs. In this paper, we posit that to act efficiently in TBGs, an agent must be able to track the state of the game while retrieving and using relevant commonsense knowledge. Thus, we propose an agent for TBGs that induces a graph representation of the game state and jointly grounds it with a graph of commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet. This combination is achieved through bidirectional knowledge graph attention between the two symbolic representations. We show that agents that incorporate commonsense into the game state graph outperform baseline agents.

2020

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Reading Comprehension as Natural Language Inference:A Semantic Analysis
Anshuman Mishra | Dhruvesh Patel | Aparna Vijayakumar | Xiang Li | Pavan Kapanipathi | Kartik Talamadupula
Proceedings of the Ninth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics

In the recent past, Natural language Inference (NLI) has gained significant attention, particularly given its promise for downstream NLP tasks. However, its true impact is limited and has not been well studied. Therefore, in this paper, we explore the utility of NLI for one of the most prominent downstream tasks, viz. Question Answering (QA). We transform one of the largest available MRC dataset (RACE) to an NLI form, and compare the performances of a state-of-the-art model (RoBERTa) on both these forms. We propose new characterizations of questions, and evaluate the performance of QA and NLI models on these categories. We highlight clear categories for which the model is able to perform better when the data is presented in a coherent entailment form, and a structured question-answer concatenation form, respectively.

2018

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A Systematic Classification of Knowledge, Reasoning, and Context within the ARC Dataset
Michael Boratko | Harshit Padigela | Divyendra Mikkilineni | Pritish Yuvraj | Rajarshi Das | Andrew McCallum | Maria Chang | Achille Fokoue-Nkoutche | Pavan Kapanipathi | Nicholas Mattei | Ryan Musa | Kartik Talamadupula | Michael Witbrock
Proceedings of the Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering

The recent work of Clark et al. (2018) introduces the AI2 Reasoning Challenge (ARC) and the associated ARC dataset that partitions open domain, complex science questions into easy and challenge sets. That paper includes an analysis of 100 questions with respect to the types of knowledge and reasoning required to answer them; however, it does not include clear definitions of these types, nor does it offer information about the quality of the labels. We propose a comprehensive set of definitions of knowledge and reasoning types necessary for answering the questions in the ARC dataset. Using ten annotators and a sophisticated annotation interface, we analyze the distribution of labels across the challenge set and statistics related to them. Additionally, we demonstrate that although naive information retrieval methods return sentences that are irrelevant to answering the query, sufficient supporting text is often present in the (ARC) corpus. Evaluating with human-selected relevant sentences improves the performance of a neural machine comprehension model by 42 points.

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An Interface for Annotating Science Questions
Michael Boratko | Harshit Padigela | Divyendra Mikkilineni | Pritish Yuvraj | Rajarshi Das | Andrew McCallum | Maria Chang | Achille Fokoue | Pavan Kapanipathi | Nicholas Mattei | Ryan Musa | Kartik Talamadupula | Michael Witbrock
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Recent work introduces the AI2 Reasoning Challenge (ARC) and the associated ARC dataset that partitions open domain, complex science questions into an Easy Set and a Challenge Set. That work includes an analysis of 100 questions with respect to the types of knowledge and reasoning required to answer them. However, it does not include clear definitions of these types, nor does it offer information about the quality of the labels or the annotation process used. In this paper, we introduce a novel interface for human annotation of science question-answer pairs with their respective knowledge and reasoning types, in order that the classification of new questions may be improved. We build on the classification schema proposed by prior work on the ARC dataset, and evaluate the effectiveness of our interface with a preliminary study involving 10 participants.