Tom Breloff

Aditya Kalyanpur, Tom Breloff, David Ferrucci

Traditional symbolic reasoning engines, while attractive for their precision and explicability, have a few major drawbacks: the use of brittle inference procedures that rely on exact matching (unification) of logical terms, an inability to deal with uncertainty, and the need for a precompiled rule-base of knowledge (the "knowledge acquisition" problem). To address these issues, we devise a novel logical reasoner called Braid, that supports probabilistic rules, and uses the notion of custom unification functions and dynamic rule generation to overcome the brittle matching and knowledge-gap problem prevalent in traditional reasoners. In this paper, we describe the reasoning algorithms used in Braid, and their implementation in a distributed task-based framework that builds proof/explanation graphs for an input query. We use a simple QA example from a children's story to motivate Braid's design and explain how the various components work together to produce a coherent logical explanation. Finally, we evaluate Braid on the ROC Story Cloze test and achieve close to state-of-the-art results while providing frame-based explanations.

Aditya Kalyanpur, Or Biran, Tom Breloff et al.

Frame semantic parsing is a complex problem which includes multiple underlying subtasks. Recent approaches have employed joint learning of subtasks (such as predicate and argument detection), and multi-task learning of related tasks (such as syntactic and semantic parsing). In this paper, we explore multi-task learning of all subtasks with transformer-based models. We show that a purely generative encoder-decoder architecture handily beats the previous state of the art in FrameNet 1.7 parsing, and that a mixed decoding multi-task approach achieves even better performance. Finally, we show that the multi-task model also outperforms recent state of the art systems for PropBank SRL parsing on the CoNLL 2012 benchmark.