Shashank Srivastava

Graham Caron, Shashank Srivastava

Psychology research has long explored aspects of human personality such as extroversion, agreeableness and emotional stability. Categorizations like the `Big Five' personality traits are commonly used to assess and diagnose personality types. In this work, we explore the question of whether the perceived personality in language models is exhibited consistently in their language generation. For example, is a language model such as GPT2 likely to respond in a consistent way if asked to go out to a party? We also investigate whether such personality traits can be controlled. We show that when provided different types of contexts (such as personality descriptions, or answers to diagnostic questions about personality traits), language models such as BERT and GPT2 can consistently identify and reflect personality markers in those contexts. This behavior illustrates an ability to be manipulated in a highly predictable way, and frames them as tools for identifying personality traits and controlling personas in applications such as dialog systems. We also contribute a crowd-sourced data-set of personality descriptions of human subjects paired with their `Big Five' personality assessment data, and a data-set of personality descriptions collated from Reddit.

Derek Tam, Rakesh R Menon, Mohit Bansal et al.

Recently, pre-trained language models (LMs) have achieved strong performance when fine-tuned on difficult benchmarks like SuperGLUE. However, performance can suffer when there are very few labeled examples available for fine-tuning. Pattern Exploiting Training (PET) is a recent approach that leverages patterns for few-shot learning. However, PET uses task-specific unlabeled data. In this paper, we focus on few-shot learning without any unlabeled data and introduce ADAPET, which modifies PET's objective to provide denser supervision during fine-tuning. As a result, ADAPET outperforms PET on SuperGLUE without any task-specific unlabeled data. Our code can be found at https://github.com/rrmenon10/ADAPET.

Swarnadeep Saha, Sayan Ghosh, Shashank Srivastava et al.

Recent work by Clark et al. (2020) shows that transformers can act as 'soft theorem provers' by answering questions over explicitly provided knowledge in natural language. In our work, we take a step closer to emulating formal theorem provers, by proposing PROVER, an interpretable transformer-based model that jointly answers binary questions over rule-bases and generates the corresponding proofs. Our model learns to predict nodes and edges corresponding to proof graphs in an efficient constrained training paradigm. During inference, a valid proof, satisfying a set of global constraints is generated. We conduct experiments on synthetic, hand-authored, and human-paraphrased rule-bases to show promising results for QA and proof generation, with strong generalization performance. First, PROVER generates proofs with an accuracy of 87%, while retaining or improving performance on the QA task, compared to RuleTakers (up to 6% improvement on zero-shot evaluation). Second, when trained on questions requiring lower depths of reasoning, it generalizes significantly better to higher depths (up to 15% improvement). Third, PROVER obtains near perfect QA accuracy of 98% using only 40% of the training data. However, generating proofs for questions requiring higher depths of reasoning becomes challenging, and the accuracy drops to 65% for 'depth 5', indicating significant scope for future work. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/swarnaHub/PRover