Reasoning in Language Understanding and Generation

Motivations and Objectives

Given a large amount of textual data (e.g., news articles, Wikipedia, weblogs, etc.) available online, it has become increasingly important for techniques that can automatically process this data, for example, to extract event information, to answer user questions, and to make inferences. Along these lines, we are particularly interested in the role of commonsense, discourse and pragmatics in natural language understanding, generation, and applications.

Our thoughts and positions:

• Shane Storks, Qiaozi Gao, Joyce Chai. Recent Advances in Natural Language Inference: A Survey of Benchmarks, Resources, and Approaches. Preprint, 2019.

Selected Recent Papers

Reasoning with Pretrained Language Models

• Zheyuan Zhang, Shane Storks, Fengyuan Hu, Sungryull Sohn, Moontae Lee, Honglak Lee, Joyce Chai. From Heuristic to Analytic: Cognitively Motivated Strategies for Coherent Physical Commonsense Reasoning. EMNLP, 2023.
• Xiaoyang Hu, Shane Storks, Richard L. Lewis, Joyce Chai. In-Context Analogical Reasoning with Pre-Trained Language Models. ACL, 2023.
• Shane Storks, Joyce Chai. Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg: Assessing Coherence of Text Classifiers. EMNLP Findings, 2021.

Physical Commonsense Reasoning

• Shane Storks, Qiaozi Gao, Yichi Zhang, & Joyce Chai. (2021). Tiered Reasoning for Intuitive Physics: Toward Verifiable Commonsense Language Understanding. EMNLP Findings, 2021.
• Shaohua Yang, Qiaozi Gao, Sari Saba-Sadiya, and Joyce Chai. Commonsense Justification for Action Explanation. EMNLP, 2018.
• Qiaozi Gao, Shaohua Yang, Joyce Chai, Lucy Vanderwende. What Action Causes This? Towards Naive Physical Action-Effect Prediction. ACL, 2018.
• Qiaozi Gao, Malcolm Doering, Shaohua Yang, Joyce Chai. Physical Causality of Action Verbs in Grounded Language Understanding. Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Berlin, Germany, August 7-12, 2016.

Pragmatic Reasoning and Conversation Entailment

• Yuwei Bao, Sayan Ghosh, Joyce Chai. Learning to Mediate Disparities Towards Pragmatic Communication. ACL, 2022.
• Tyler Baldwin, Joyce Chai. Beyond Normalization: Pragmatics of Word Form in Text Messages. IJCNLP, 2011.
• Chen Zhang and Joyce Chai. Towards Conversation Entailment: An Empirical Investigation. EMNLP, 2010.

Implicit Arguments in Nominal Semantic Role Labeling

• Shaohua Yang, Qiaozi Gao, Changsong Liu, Caiming Xiong, Song-Chun Zhu, Joyce Chai. Grounded Semantic Role Labeling. NAACL-HLT, 2016.
• Matthew Gerber and Joyce Chai. Semantic Role Labeling of Implicit Arguments for Nominal Predicates. Computational Linguistics, 2012.
• Matthew Gerber and Joyce Chai. Beyond NomBank: A Study of Implicit Arguments for Nominal Predicates. ACL, 2010. (Best Long Paper Award)