Minjoon Seo

Machine comprehension (MC), answering a query about a given context paragraph, requires modeling complex interactions between the context and the query. Recently, attention mechanisms have been successfully extended to MC. Typically these methods use attention to focus on a small portion of the context and summarize it with a fixed-size vector, couple attentions temporally, and/or often form a uni-directional attention. In this paper we introduce the Bi-Directional Attention Flow (BIDAF) network

We introduce the task of Multi-Modal Machine Comprehension (M3C), which aims at answering multimodal questions given a context of text, diagrams and images. We present the Textbook Question Answering (TQA) dataset that includes 1,076 lessons and 26,260 multi-modal questions, taken from middle school science curricula. Our analysis shows that a significant portion of questions require complex parsing of the text and the diagrams and reasoning, indicating that our dataset is more complex compared

We present the results of the Machine Reading for Question Answering (MRQA) 2019 shared task on evaluating the generalization capabilities of reading comprehension systems. 1 In this task, we adapted and unified 18 distinct question answering datasets into the same format. Among them, six datasets were made available for training, six datasets were made available for development, and the final six were hidden for final evaluation. Ten teams submitted systems, which explored various ideas includi

Weijia Shi, Sewon Min, Michihiro Yasunaga, Minjoon Seo, Richard James, Mike Lewis, Luke Zettlemoyer, Wen-tau Yih. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

This paper introduces GEOS, the first automated system to solve unaltered SAT geometry questions by combining text understanding and diagram interpretation. We model the problem of understanding geometry questions as submodular optimization, and identify a formal problem description likely to be compatible with both the question text and diagram. GEOS then feeds the description to a geometric solver that attempts to determine the correct answer. In our experiments, GEOS achieves a 49% score on o

We present SQLova, the first Natural-language-to-SQL (NL2SQL) model to achieve human performance in WikiSQL dataset. We revisit and discuss diverse popular methods in NL2SQL literature, take a full advantage of BERT {Devlin et al., 2018) through an effective table contextualization method, and coherently combine them, outperforming the previous state of the art by 8.2% and 2.5% in logical form and execution accuracy, respectively. We particularly note that BERT with a seq2seq decoder leads to a

Information Extraction (IE) for semistructured document images is often approached as a sequence tagging problem by classifying each recognized input token into one of the IOB (Inside, Outside, and Beginning) categories. However, such problem setup has two inherent limitations that (1) it cannot easily handle complex spatial relationships and (2) it is not suitable for highly structured information, which are nevertheless frequently observed in real-world document images. To tackle these issues,

We introduce REPLUG, a retrieval-augmented language modeling framework that treats the language model (LM) as a black box and augments it with a tuneable retrieval model. Unlike prior retrieval-augmented LMs that train language models with special cross attention mechanisms to encode the retrieved text, REPLUG simply prepends retrieved documents to the input for the frozen black-box LM. This simple design can be easily applied to any existing retrieval and language models. Furthermore, we show t

We review the EfficientQA competition from NeurIPS 2020. The competition focused on open-domain question answering (QA), where systems take natural language questions as input and return natural language answers. The aim of the competition was to build systems that can predict correct answers while also satisfying strict on-disk memory budgets. These memory budgets were designed to encourage contestants to explore the trade-off between storing retrieval corpora or the parameters of learned model

We show that relation extraction can be reduced to answering simple reading comprehension questions, by associating one or more natural-language questions with each relation slot. This reduction has several advantages: we can (1) learn relationextraction models by extending recent neural reading-comprehension techniques, (2) build very large training sets for those models by combining relation-specific crowd-sourced questions with distant supervision, and even (3) do zero-shot learning by extrac

In this paper, we study the problem of question answering when reasoning over multiple facts is required. We propose Query-Reduction Network (QRN), a variant of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that effectively handles both short-term (local) and long-term (global) sequential dependencies to reason over multiple facts. QRN considers the context sentences as a sequence of state-changing triggers, and reduces the original query to a more informed query as it observes each trigger (context sentence)

Inspired by the principles of speed reading, we introduce Skim-RNN, a recurrent neural network (RNN) that dynamically decides to update only a small fraction of the hidden state for relatively unimportant input tokens. Skim-RNN gives computational advantage over an RNN that always updates the entire hidden state. Skim-RNN uses the same input and output interfaces as a standard RNN and can be easily used instead of RNNs in existing models. In our experiments, we show that Skim-RNN can achieve sig

Joel Jang, Dongkeun Yoon, Sohee Yang, Sungmin Cha, Moontae Lee, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Minjoon Seo. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Language models (LMs) with less than 100B parameters are known to perform poorly on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in contrast to large LMs when solving unseen tasks. In this work, we aim to equip smaller LMs with the step-by-step reasoning capability by instruction tuning with CoT rationales. In order to achieve this goal, we first introduce a new instruction-tuning dataset called the CoT Collection, which augments the existing Flan Collection (including only 9 CoT tasks) with additional 1.84