The mission of open knowledge graph (KG) completion is to draw new findings from known facts. Existing works that augment KG completion require either (1) factual triples to enlarge the graph reasoning space or (2) manually designed prompts to extract knowledge from a pre-trained language model (PLM), exhibiting limited performance and requiring expensive efforts from experts. To this end, we propose TAGREAL that automatically generates quality query prompts and retrieves support information from large text corpora to probe knowledge from PLM for KG completion. The results show that TAGREAL achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets. We find that TAGREAL has superb performance even with limited training data, outperforming existing embedding-based, graph-based, and PLM-based methods.

Sign language is a visual language that enhances communication between people and is frequently used as the primary form of communication by people with hearing loss. Even so, not many people with hearing loss use sign language, and they frequently experience social isolation. Therefore, it is necessary to create human-computer interface systems that can offer hearing-impaired people a social platform. Most commercial sign language translation systems now on the market are sensor-based, pricey, and challenging to use. Although vision-based systems are desperately needed, they must first overcome several challenges. Earlier continuous sign language recognition techniques used hidden Markov models, which have a limited ability to include temporal information. To get over these restrictions, several machine learning approaches are being applied to transform hand and sign language motions into spoken or written language. In this study, we compare various deep learning techniques for recognising sign language. Our survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the most recent approaches and challenges in this field.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models based on Machine Learning (ML) are susceptible to adversarial attacks -- malicious algorithms that imperceptibly modify input text to force models into making incorrect predictions. However, evaluations of these attacks ignore the property of imperceptibility or study it under limited settings. This entails that adversarial perturbations would not pass any human quality gate and do not represent real threats to human-checked NLP systems. To bypass this limitation and enable proper assessment (and later, improvement) of NLP model robustness, we have surveyed 378 human participants about the perceptibility of text adversarial examples produced by state-of-the-art methods. Our results underline that existing text attacks are impractical in real-world scenarios where humans are involved. This contrasts with previous smaller-scale human studies, which reported overly optimistic conclusions regarding attack success. Through our work, we hope to position human perceptibility as a first-class success criterion for text attacks, and provide guidance for research to build effective attack algorithms and, in turn, design appropriate defence mechanisms.

The current approach to connected and autonomous driving function development and evaluation uses model-in-the-loop simulation, hardware-in-the-loop simulation, and limited proving ground work followed by public road deployment of beta version of software and technology. The rest of the road users are involuntarily forced into taking part in the development and evaluation of these connected and autonomous driving functions in this approach. This is an unsafe, costly and inefficient method. Motivated by these shortcomings, this paper introduces the Vehicle-in-Virtual-Environment (VVE) method of safe, efficient and low cost connected and autonomous driving function development, evaluation and demonstration. The VVE method is compared to the existing state-of-the-art. Its basic implementation for a path following task is used to explain the method where the actual autonomous vehicle operates in a large empty area with its sensor feeds being replaced by realistic sensor feeds corresponding to its location and pose in the virtual environment. It is possible to easily change the development virtual environment and inject rare and difficult events which can be tested very safely. Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication based pedestrian safety is chosen as the application use case for VVE and corresponding experimental results are presented and discussed. It is noted that actual pedestrians and other vulnerable road users can be used very safely in this approach.

Recent studies show that sentence-level extractive QA, i.e., based on Answer Sentence Selection (AS2), is outperformed by Generation-based QA (GenQA) models, which generate answers using the top-k answer sentences ranked by AS2 models (a la retrieval-augmented generation style). In this paper, we propose a novel training paradigm for GenQA using supervision from automatic QA evaluation models (GAVA). Specifically, we propose three strategies to transfer knowledge from these QA evaluation models to a GenQA model: (i) augmenting training data with answers generated by the GenQA model and labelled by GAVA (either statically, before training, or (ii) dynamically, at every training epoch); and (iii) using the GAVA score for weighting the generator loss during the learning of the GenQA model. We evaluate our proposed methods on two academic and one industrial dataset, obtaining a significant improvement in answering accuracy over the previous state of the art.

The widely studied task of Natural Language Inference (NLI) requires a system to recognize whether one piece of text is textually entailed by another, i.e. whether the entirety of its meaning can be inferred from the other. In current NLI datasets and models, textual entailment relations are typically defined on the sentence- or paragraph-level. However, even a simple sentence often contains multiple propositions, i.e. distinct units of meaning conveyed by the sentence. As these propositions can carry different truth values in the context of a given premise, we argue for the need to recognize the textual entailment relation of each proposition in a sentence individually. We propose PropSegmEnt, a corpus of over 45K propositions annotated by expert human raters. Our dataset structure resembles the tasks of (1) segmenting sentences within a document to the set of propositions, and (2) classifying the entailment relation of each proposition with respect to a different yet topically-aligned document, i.e. documents describing the same event or entity. We establish strong baselines for the segmentation and entailment tasks. Through case studies on summary hallucination detection and document-level NLI, we demonstrate that our conceptual framework is potentially useful for understanding and explaining the compositionality of NLI labels.

Noun compound interpretation is the task of expressing a noun compound (e.g. chocolate bunny) in a free-text paraphrase that makes the relationship between the constituent nouns explicit (e.g. bunny-shaped chocolate). We propose modifications to the data and evaluation setup of the standard task (Hendrickx et al., 2013), and show that GPT-3 solves it almost perfectly. We then investigate the task of noun compound conceptualization, i.e. paraphrasing a novel or rare noun compound. E.g., chocolate crocodile is a crocodile-shaped chocolate. This task requires creativity, commonsense, and the ability to generalize knowledge about similar concepts. While GPT-3's performance is not perfect, it is better than that of humans -- likely thanks to its access to vast amounts of knowledge, and because conceptual processing is effortful for people (Connell and Lynott, 2012). Finally, we estimate the extent to which GPT-3 is reasoning about the world vs. parroting its training data. We find that the outputs from GPT-3 often have significant overlap with a large web corpus, but that the parroting strategy is less beneficial for novel noun compounds.

The usefulness of part-of-speech tags for parsing has been heavily questioned due to the success of word-contextualized parsers. Yet, most studies are limited to coarse-grained tags and high quality written content; while we know little about their influence when it comes to models in production that face lexical errors. We expand these setups and design an adversarial attack to verify if the use of morphological information by parsers: (i) contributes to error propagation or (ii) if on the other hand it can play a role to correct mistakes that word-only neural parsers make. The results on 14 diverse UD treebanks show that under such attacks, for transition- and graph-based models their use contributes to degrade the performance even faster, while for the (lower-performing) sequence labeling parsers they are helpful. We also show that if morphological tags were utopically robust against lexical perturbations, they would be able to correct parsing mistakes.

We propose SETI (Systematicity Evaluation of Textual Inference), a novel and comprehensive benchmark designed for evaluating pre-trained language models (PLMs) for their systematicity capabilities in the domain of textual inference. Specifically, SETI offers three different NLI tasks and corresponding datasets to evaluate various types of systematicity in reasoning processes. In order to solve these tasks, models are required to perform compositional inference based on known primitive constituents. We conduct experiments of SETI on six widely used PLMs. Results show that various PLMs are able to solve unseen compositional inferences when having encountered the knowledge of how to combine primitives, with good performance. However, they are considerably limited when this knowledge is unknown to the model (40-100% points decrease). Furthermore, we find that PLMs can improve drastically once exposed to crucial compositional knowledge in minimalistic shots. These findings position SETI as the first benchmark for measuring the future progress of PLMs in achieving systematicity generalization in the textual inference.

Natural language understanding (NLU) studies often exaggerate or underestimate the capabilities of systems, thereby limiting the reproducibility of their findings. These erroneous evaluations can be attributed to the difficulty of defining and testing NLU adequately. In this position paper, we reconsider this challenge by identifying two types of researcher degrees of freedom. We revisit Turing's original interpretation of the Turing test and indicate that an NLU test does not provide an operational definition; it merely provides inductive evidence that the test subject understands the language sufficiently well to meet stakeholder objectives. In other words, stakeholders are free to arbitrarily define NLU through their objectives. To use the test results as inductive evidence, stakeholders must carefully assess if the interpretation of test scores is valid or not. However, designing and using NLU tests involve other degrees of freedom, such as specifying target skills and defining evaluation metrics. As a result, achieving consensus among stakeholders becomes difficult. To resolve this issue, we propose a validity argument, which is a framework comprising a series of validation criteria across test components. By demonstrating that current practices in NLU studies can be associated with those criteria and organizing them into a comprehensive checklist, we prove that the validity argument can serve as a coherent guideline for designing credible test sets and facilitating scientific communication.