Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing

This long-overdue blog post is based on the Commonsense Tutorial taught by Maarten Sap, Antoine Bosselut, Yejin Choi, Dan Roth, and myself at ACL 2020. Credit for much of the content goes to the co-instructors, but any errors are mine. 

In the last 5 years, popular media has made it seem that AI is nearly---if not already---solved by deep learning, with reports on super-human performance on speech recognition, image captioning, and object recognition. The release of Google Translate’s neural models in 2016 reported large performance improvements: “60% reduction in translation errors on several popular language pairs”. But looking under the hood, these numbers seem to be misleading. Neural models find shortcuts to the correct answers through dataset-specific input-output correlations, essentially solving the dataset but not the underlying task. When models are challenged with adversarial out-of-domain examples, they perform poorly. Small unnoticeable noise added to images confuses object recognition models and changes their predictions. Visual question answering models guess the answer based on the frequency of answers for the same type of question in the training set, e.g. replying "2" to any "how many" question. Image captioning models often learn to recognize objects based solely on their typical environment, and fail to recognize them outside their typical environment. In NLP, dialogue systems generate highly generic responses such as “I don’t know” even for simple questions. Open-ended generation is prone to repetition. Question answering systems are easily distracted by the addition of an unrelated sentence to the passage. And more. 

Figure 1: adversarial examples in computer vision (left) and natural language processing tasks (right).

Machine learning models today perform reasonably well on perception tasks (image and speech recognition). However, they mostly lack the ability to perform simple intuitive commonsense inferences that humans do in every minute of their waking hours, regarding pre- and post-conditions of events, understanding other people's motivations and intents, mental and emotional states, etc. 

Table of contents: 

1. What is commonsense? 
2. Is commonsense knowledge already captured by pre-trained language models? 
3. How to create benchmarks to measure commonsense reasoning capabilities? 
4. How to gather and represent machine readable commonsense knowledge? 
5. How to enhance neural models for commonsense reasoning tasks with symbolic knowledge? 
• Static integration
• Dynamic integration 
6. Summary

What is commonsense? 

The boundaries of commonsense are quite challenging to define, but we will go with this working definition:

Commonsense is the basic level of practical knowledge and reasoning concerning everyday situations and events that are commonly shared among most people. 

For example, it's commonsense that it's OK to keep the closet door open, but not the fridge door, as the food inside might go bad. 

Types of commonsense: 

Commonsense knowledge can be categorized according to types, including but not limited to:

• Social commonsense: people are capable of making inferences about other people's mental states, e.g. what motivates them, what they are likely to do next, etc. This kind of inferences is captured by the ATOMIC knowledge base, discussed later. In addition, we each have a set of social norms of accepted behavior, e.g. knowing that “it's impolite to comment on someone's weight”. While these are often implicit in our actions and decisions, machines need to be taught them explicitly. 
  
  
• Temporal commonsense: natural language rarely communicates explicit temporal information. Instead it's vague and relies on the commonsense knowledge of the listener. For example, when told that "Dr. Porter is taking a vacation" we can predict that Dr. Porter will not be able to see us soon, as opposed to when "Dr. Porter is taking a walk". This requires knowing the typical duration of "taking a walk" (minutes) and that of "taking a vacation" (days). Other temporal knowledge is typical times, order, frequency, etc. of events which are addressed by the MC-TACO dataset and the TACO-LM time-aware contextual language model. 
  
  
• Physical commonsense: a glass will likely shatter if it falls to the floor, is a fact most people (and arguably cats) know. Physical commonsense includes knowledge about the physical properties and affordances of everyday objects, as tested in the PIQA dataset.

Commonsense is essential for humans to navigate everyday situations seamlessly and interact with each other in a reasonable and safe way, and for AI to understand human needs and actions better. Yet, endowing machines with such human-like commonsense reasoning capabilities has remained an elusive goal of AI research for decades. Past attempts, in the 1960s and 1970s, resulted in an AI winter, i.e. reduced interest and funding for AI research due to failed over-hyped research directions. In recent years, new interest in machine commonsense has emerged, with the availability of stronger computing power and huge amounts of data. With that said, the path to machine commonsense is unlikely to be brute force training larger neural networks with deeper layers.   

Is commonsense knowledge already captured by pre-trained language models?

In the last 3 years, language models have been ubiquitous in NLP. Language models are pre-trained once, in a self-supervised manner that requires only a large text corpus. Traditionally, language models are trained to predict the next word in a sentence (top part of Figure 2, in blue), but they can also predict hidden (masked) words in the middle of the sentence, as in Google's BERT model (top part of Figure 2, in orange). This pre-training phase yields a function that gets a sequence of words (sentence, short paragraph) and returns a vector for each word in the sequence. 

  

Figure 2: Language models pre-training and fine-tuning.

As opposed to word embeddings which are static, language model-based word vectors are dynamic and re-computed for each context. At the very basic level, they assign different vectors to words when they are used in different senses, as in Figure 3. 

Figure 3: Static vs. dynamic word representations.

Do off-the-shelf pre-trained language models already capture commonsense knowledge? 

✅  They are capable to some extent, of filling incomplete commonsense facts or ranking candidate facts. For example, the language model score (≈ statement plausibility) of a fact like "a musician plays a musical instrument" is higher than "a dancer plays a musical instrument". This is a proof that, in addition to lexical and syntactic knowledge, language models capture general knowledge about the world.  

✅  They can, to some extent, associate concepts with their properties. They distinguish concepts 
associated with a given set of properties, i.e. complete a statement such as "A        has fur, is big, and has claws, has teeth, is an animal, ..." with bear (just like playing the "20 question game"). They perform better when they are shown encyclopedic properties (e.g. is an animal) as opposed to perceptual properties (e.g. smooth). They can also, pretty successfully, list the properties 
associated with given concepts, e.g. complete the sentence "Everyone knows that a bear has       " with fur, claws, teeth, etc. 

However, knowledge generated from language models is noisy! 

🚫 Several papers have shown that language models are not sensitive to negation, i.e. they consider the negated version of facts ("birds can't fly") as similarly plausible. 

🚫 They are sensitive to phrasing:

🚫  In distributional word vectors, the vector representing a (sub-)word is learned from the contexts in which it appeared, leading to similar representation for semantically-similar words. In language models, the representation of similar contexts is similar, so the model learns which type of word should appear next (or instead of a masked token). This is generally a positive thing, but it sometimes over-generalizes, leading to examples such as this: 

Figure 4: BERT guesses that the masked token should be a color, but fails to predict the correct color. Using the AllenNLP demo. 

Here, BERT has seen in its training corpus enough sentences of the type "The color of something is [color]" to know to suggest different colors as substitutes for the masked word. Unfortunately, not every color is suitable in every context that calls for a color. BERT likely didn't see enough sentences discussing the color of a dove, thus it defaults to just predicting any color.  

So knowledge in language models is not the most accurate and reliable. Is it still useful?

Yes, to some extent. One way to show it is through evaluation on tasks requiring commonsense knowledge. We will discuss several such tasks, but for now let's focus on WinoGrande as an example. It is the large-scale version of the Winograd Schema Challenge. Given a sentence with a cloze, the goal is to fill in the blank with a previously mentioned entity or concept, out of two answer choices. For example: 

Because Brett found an internship while in college but Ian was unable to, _____ found a job less quickly after graduation. 

Choices: Brett, Ian

What makes this task especially difficult is that every instance has a twin sentence which is minimally changed such that the correct answer is the other one (for instance, replacing "less quickly" with "more quickly" will change the correct answer from Ian to Brett). 

Language model-based models top the leaderboards of WinoGrande and other commonsense tasks, but since they are trained on task specific training data, which often contains tens or hundreds of thousands of training examples, it's hard to attribute the success to the knowledge captured in language models from the pre-training step. A better way to estimate it is with zero-shot (unsupervised) models. Typically, the way zero-shot models address multiple-choice tasks is by phrasing a statement from the instance and each answer choice, and computing the language model score as a proxy for plausibility:

PLM(The answer is answer1) 

PLM(The answer is answer2) 

...

PLM(The answer is answerk)

And then predicting the answer choice with the best language model score (highest probability, which is usually computed as the lowest perplexity). 

In our recent EMNLP paper, we took it one step further and asked whether we can use language models to generate what would otherwise be missing or implicit knowledge needed for solving a multiple choice commonsense question answering instance. We proposed the unsupervised "self-talk" framework, that uses language models to generate information seeking questions such as "what is the definition of..." and their corresponding answers (clarifications) to discover additional background knowledge. In the example in Figure 5, knowing that internship experience may help a person get a job is crucial for answering the question (which of Brett and Ian found a job less quickly?). On most benchmarks, the self-talk model performed better than unsupervised models with no additional knowledge, while competing with models that have access to knowledge bases. This is despite the inaccurate and noisy knowledge language models generate. However, when we showed people some of the clarifications that helped the model choose the correct answer choice, they judged only 40% of them as actually providing helpful information. This discrepancy means that our model doesn't imitate human reasoning process - it works differently. Check out our demo! It's not always accurate but it's often funny :) 

Figure 5: An example of clarification generation for an instance from WinoGrande.

The best performance on commonsense tasks is achieved by fine-tuning language models, i.e. training them on task-specific data. Let's look at some of the benchmarks and the issues we face with supervised learning.  

How to measure commonsense reasoning capabilities? 

Multiple commonsense benchmarks have been released over the last few years. Some of them will be discussed here (see examples in Figure 6), along with the main differences and design choices when creating a benchmark.

Figure 6: Some commonsense benchmarks along with an example instance. 

Type of knowledge: some benchmarks focus on a specific type of commonsense knowledge, such as social commonsense (e.g. Social IQa),  physical commonsense (e.g. PIQA), temporal commonsense (e.g. MC-TACO),  or causes and effects (e.g. COPA), while others target a broader domain of general commonsense knowledge and reasoning (e.g. WSC, WinoGrande, CommonsenseQA, ROCStories).  

Size: most recent datasets include a large training set, in order to facilitate training large neural models. One way to create a benchmark is to hire experts to curate a high-quality dataset such as for WSC and COPA. These datasets are rather expensive to collect and are therefore typically small. The common alternative is to collect data through crowdsourcing or semi-automatically, and split it randomly to train, validation, and test sets. Models that learned data-specific shortcuts in the training set instead of generalized phenomena are likely to perform well on a test set drawn from the same distribution, but this performance is misleading and is likely a lot better than on real-world instances of the task.  Despite this understanding, this is still the dominant approach. 

Format: the vast majority of datasets are in the format of multiple choice questions, as exemplified in Figure 6. This format is the easiest to evaluate automatically: models are judged for their accuracy, i.e. what percent of the questions they answered correctly. Unfortunately, this type of tasks also makes it possible for a model to guess the correct answer. We're not talking about a random guess, which would leave enough room for improvement. A random guess is expected to result in an accuracy of 100/k %, where k is the number of answer choices, e.g. 50% accuracy for binary tests, 33.3% for tests with 3 choices, 25% for 4 choices, etc. The risk is that the model makes an "educated guess" based on - yes, you guessed it correctly - spurious correlations between the questions and the correct/incorrect answers. 

How do you make sure a model is right for the right reasons?

That's the million-dollar question. We don't have a perfect solution for this problem yet. For a start, when collecting a new benchmark, the process of collecting incorrect answers (=distractors) should be well-designed such that distractors are plausible but unlikely. Using random answers as distractors (e.g. naturally-occurring sentences or correct answers of different questions) would create topically-different distractors, which are easy to detect (remember, relatedness is one of the strengths of distributional text representations). Asking people to come up with the distractors may introduce other annotation artifacts, such as exaggerations, going off-topic, or producing overly emotional texts, which are easy for models to detect. Some solutions have been proposed: for example, the distractors in Social IQa are answers for different questions asked on the same context. In Figure 7, the context "Alex spilt food all over the floor

and it made a huge mess." appears in the dataset with two questions: "what happens next?" and "what happened before?". The distractors of "what happens next?" are the correct answers of "what happened before?", e.g. that Alex has slippery hands. A similar approach is taken in CommonsenseQA. 

Figure 7: Creating distractors for a Social IQa instance. Image credit: Maarten Sap.

An alternative solution is to filter out easy questions through "adversarial filtering", i.e. training a weaker model and iteratively removing instances that it succeeds in answering. Variants of adversarial filtering were applied to WinoGrande and PIQA. 

Finally, I believe the future is in generative tasks, in which the model needs to produce a free text answer without being provided with the candidate answers. Several recent benchmarks are generative, such as TimeTravel (counterfactual reasoning), ART (abductive reasoning), CommonGen, and ProtoQA. The challenge in generative tasks is the lack of reliable automatic evaluation metrics. Given the gold standard reference answer(s), we would like a metric to (1) reward correct generated answers that are different from the reference answer, while (2) penalizing incorrect answers that are similar (e.g. lexically) to the reference. Human evaluation is reliable, but it is costly and is typically done once on the test set. In order to be able to improve models during development, we need automatic metrics. We currently settle for metrics based on lexical overlap such as BLEU and ROUGE which are pretty terrible at (1) and have little correlation with human judgements, or model-based metrics such as BERT score that are not great at (2). 

How to gather and represent machine readable commonsense knowledge?

Commonsense resources provide machine-readable knowledge about the world. Resources are expected to be large-scale and accurate, consist of diverse knowledge types, and be usable in downstream tasks. ConceptNet is a large (21 million assertions), commonly-used resource consisting of general commonsense knowledge, in over 85 languages. ATOMIC consists of 880,000 triplets reasoning about causes and effects of everyday situations. Other resources are listed in Figure 8.

Figure 8: Overview of existing commonsense resources. Image credit: Maarten Sap. 

Existing resources differ in several aspects:

Representation: how is knowledge represented in the resource? ConceptNet and ATOMIC represent knowledge in natural language (Figure 9), while NELL and Cyc represent knowledge in symbolic logic:

(#$implies (#$and (#$isa ?OBJ ?SUBSET) (#$genls ?SUBSET ?SUPERSET)) (#$isa ?OBJ ?SUPERSET)) 

Figure 9: example knowledge extracted from ConceptNet and ATOMIC. Image credit: Maarten Sap. 

Knowledge type: ConceptNet consists of semantic knowledge, i.e. properties of concepts (e.g. reading is a type of activity). ATOMIC, on the other hand, is inferential: given a templated event with "PersonX" representing the subject and "PersonY" an optional object(s) (e.g. PersonX yells at PersonY), and one of 9 pre-defined relation dimensions (e.g. PersonX's motivation) it provides a second event (e.g. PersonX wanted to express anger). 

Collection method: knowledge can be collected from humans, either experts or crowdsourcing workers. Expert-curated resources are more uniform and accurate, and may use complex representations, but it is an expensive collection method, and it is very time consuming. Alternatively, non-experts can write knowledge in natural language, making the collection faster and more scalable.

The alternative approach is to extract knowledge automatically from texts, as in NELL. This approach works, but it produces less accurate knowledge. In addition, the approach suffers from reporting bias: over-representing the rare at the expense of the trivial. For example, people are reported to murder more often than they are reported to breathe. Default properties of concepts (yellow banana) are mentioned less often than their alternatives (green banana), etc. 

How to enhance neural models for commonsense reasoning tasks with symbolic knowledge?

Most models developed for solving commonsense benchmarks today are based on language models. Typically, each answer choice, along with the context, forms a statement. The language model computes a vector representing each statement. These vectors are then fed into a classifier that assigns a plausibility score for each candidate answer:

Figure 10: An illustration of using BERT to score the answer choices of a WinoGrande instance.

Static neuro-symbolic integration

The knowledge in commonsense resources may enhance models built for solving commonsense benchmarks. For example, we can extract from ConceptNet the assertions that job is used for making money, that spending money requires making money, that buying requires spending money, and that car is something you can buy. Ideally we would also need the knowledge that a high-paying job is a type of job, specifically one used for making a lot of money, which is required for spending a lot of money, which is required for buying something that costs a lot of money, car being one of them. Finally, we may want to remove the edge from "buy" to "car" so we can only get to "car" from the node "buy something that costs a lot of money". 

Figure 12: Knowledge extracted from ConceptNet for the WinoGrande instance discussed above.

How do we incorporate knowledge from knowledge resources into a neural model?

The simple recipe (success not guaranteed) calls for 4 ingredients: the task addressed, the knowledge resource used, the neural component, and the combination method. We have already discussed tasks and knowledge resources, so I would only add here that ConceptNet is the main resource utilized for downstream models, although some models incorporate other knowledge sources, such as other knowledge bases (WordNet, ATOMIC), knowledge mined from text, and tools (knowledge base embeddings, sentiment analysis models, COMET - see below). 

Figure 13: Resources used by most knowledge-informed commonsense models.

The neural component is the shiny new neural architecture - language models in the last 3 years, biLSTMs in the years prior, etc. The more interesting component is the combination method. We will look at 3 examples:

Incorporating into the scoring function: Lin et al. (2017) extracted probabilistic "rules" connecting pairs of terms from multiple sources such as WordNet (restaurant→eatery: 1.0), Wikipedia categories (restaurant→business: 1.0), script knowledge mined from text (X went to a restaurant→X ate: 0.32), word embedding-based relatedness scores (restaurant→food: 0.71), and more. The model scores each candidate answer according to the scores of the inference rules used to get from the context (e.g. "Mary walked to a restaurant" in Figure 14) to the candidate answer (e.g. "She ordered foods.").  

Figure 14: "covering" each candidate answer by the original context and the rules extracted from various sources. Image credit: Lin et al. (2017).

Representing symbolic knowledge as vectors: Lin et al. (2019) used BERT as the neural component to represent the instance (statement vector). For their symbolic component, they extracted subgraphs from ConceptNet pertaining to concepts mentioned in the instance and learned to represent them as a vector (graph vector). These two vectors were provided as input to the answer scorer which was trained to predict the correct answer choice. 

Figure 15: extracting subgraphs from ConceptNet pertaining to concepts mentioned in the instance. Image credit: Lin et al. (2019).

Multi-task learning: Xia et al. (2019) fine-tuned a BERT model to solve the multiple choice questions. They also trained two auxiliary tasks supervised by ConceptNet, in which two concepts were given as input and the classifier had to predict whether they are related or not, and the specific ConceptNet property that connects them. The BERT model was shared between the main and the auxiliary tasks, so that commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet was instilled into BERT, improving its performance on the main task.

Figure 16: multi-task learning aimed at instilling knowledge from ConceptNet into BERT.

Dynamic neuro-symbolic integration

There are two main limitations to the neuro-symbolic integration discussed above:

1. Coverage: relevant knowledge is often not found as-is in commonsense knowledge resources. As we've seen earlier, commonsense knowledge is immeasurably vast, so much of it is not documented. 
   
   
2. Precision and context: knowledge found in the knowledge base about concept X doesn't necessarily apply to all contexts in which X appears. For example, when provided with "PersonX adopts a cat", ATOMIC says that PersonX had to go to the shelter first (Figure 17), but that's not always the case. It may as well be that PersonX adopted a cat they found on the street or got the cat from a friend who was no longer able to care for it. 

Figure 17: ATOMIC inferences for the event "PersonX adopted a cat".

How do we provide machines with large-scale, contextualized commonsense knowledge?

The solution is to leverage manually curated commonsense knowledge resources, such as ConceptNet and ATOMIC, to train a model that can dynamically produce such knowledge for a given context. Commonsense knowledge resources are typically sparse, making training a knowledge base completion model to extend the resource less efficient. Pre-trained language models and their inherent knowledge come in handy here. Language models (such as GPT) implicitly represent knowledge, so you can re-train them on completing knowledge base assertions (e.g. from ATOMIC) to teach them the structure of knowledge. This is what COMET (COMmonsEnse Transformers) does, as illustrated in Figure 18. 

Figure 18: Illustration of the training process of COMET: The language model is fine-tuned to predict the "tail entity" (e.g. inference in ATOMIC) given the "head entity" and the relation. Image credit: Antoine Bosselut.

COMET is capable of dynamically generating inferences for any context. For example, if we modify the context from ATOMIC to "David adopted his sister's cat because they found out her husband was allergic.", which for obvious reasons does not appear in ATOMIC, COMET no longer predicts that PersonX (David) had to go to the shelter, but instead that he, for example, needed to find out about it.

COMET has been used successfully in various downstream tasks requiring commonsense knowledge. Models trained on ATOMIC or on ConceptNet are available, and the demo for both ATOMIC and COMET can be found here. There is also a Visual COMET that can generate inferences from images. 

Summary

We talked about ways to acquire and represent commonsense knowledge in machine readable format, ways to measure commonsense reasoning abilities, and ways to integrate this kind of knowledge into models. None of these is solved yet. Manually collecting all the commonsense knowledge is infeasible, while extracting it from texts or from language models suffers from inaccuracies, reporting bias, and societal biases. Looking forward, a promising research direction is multi-modal commonsense knowledge acquisition, e.g. learning from texts along images and videos. For example, looking through enough class photos, you might learn that the kids in the front row typically sit (especially if the kids in the last row are also seated). 

Machines may reach human performance on commonsense benchmarks but it's often due to being right for the wrong reasons rather than actually possessing and successfully applying commonsense knowledge and reasoning abilities. Generative tasks are somewhat less prone to this issue, but we would have to develop reliable automatic evaluation metrics to make them the standard. 

Machine commonsense reasoning is becoming more and more popular within NLP so I am optimistic about future breakthroughs!