Timo Pierre Schrader

Timo Pierre Schrader, Teresa Bürkle, Sophie Henning et al.

Scientific publications follow conventionalized rhetorical structures. Classifying the Argumentative Zone (AZ), e.g., identifying whether a sentence states a Motivation, a Result or Background information, has been proposed to improve processing of scholarly documents. In this work, we adapt and extend this idea to the domain of materials science research. We present and release a new dataset of 50 manually annotated research articles. The dataset spans seven sub-topics and is annotated with a materials-science focused multi-label annotation scheme for AZ. We detail corpus statistics and demonstrate high inter-annotator agreement. Our computational experiments show that using domain-specific pre-trained transformer-based text encoders is key to high classification performance. We also find that AZ categories from existing datasets in other domains are transferable to varying degrees.

Timo Pierre Schrader, Lukas Lange, Tobias Kaminski et al.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has sparked interest in coding assistants. While general-purpose programming languages are well supported, generating code for domain-specific languages remains a challenging problem for LLMs. In this paper, we focus on the LLM-based generation of code for Answer Set Programming (ASP), a particularly effective approach for finding solutions to combinatorial search problems. The effectiveness of LLMs in ASP code generation is currently hindered by the limited number of examples seen during their initial pre-training phase. In this paper, we introduce a novel ASP-solver-in-the-loop approach for solver-guided instruction-tuning of LLMs to addressing the highly complex semantic parsing task inherent in ASP code generation. Our method only requires problem specifications in natural language and their solutions. Specifically, we sample ASP statements for program continuations from LLMs for unriddling logic puzzles. Leveraging the special property of declarative ASP programming that partial encodings increasingly narrow down the solution space, we categorize them into chosen and rejected instances based on solver feedback. We then apply supervised fine-tuning to train LLMs on the curated data and further improve robustness using a solver-guided search that includes best-of-N sampling. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in two distinct prompting settings on two datasets.

Timo Pierre Schrader, Matteo Finco, Stefan Grünewald et al.

Keeping track of all relevant recent publications and experimental results for a research area is a challenging task. Prior work has demonstrated the efficacy of information extraction models in various scientific areas. Recently, several datasets have been released for the yet understudied materials science domain. However, these datasets focus on sub-problems such as parsing synthesis procedures or on sub-domains, e.g., solid oxide fuel cells. In this resource paper, we present MuLMS, a new dataset of 50 open-access articles, spanning seven sub-domains of materials science. The corpus has been annotated by domain experts with several layers ranging from named entities over relations to frame structures. We present competitive neural models for all tasks and demonstrate that multi-task training with existing related resources leads to benefits.

Timo Pierre Schrader, Lukas Lange, Simon Razniewski et al.

Reasoning is key to many decision making processes. It requires consolidating a set of rule-like premises that are often associated with degrees of uncertainty and observations to draw conclusions. In this work, we address both the case where premises are specified as numeric probabilistic rules and situations in which humans state their estimates using words expressing degrees of certainty. Existing probabilistic reasoning datasets simplify the task, e.g., by requiring the model to only rank textual alternatives, by including only binary random variables, or by making use of a limited set of templates that result in less varied text. In this work, we present QUITE, a question answering dataset of real-world Bayesian reasoning scenarios with categorical random variables and complex relationships. QUITE provides high-quality natural language verbalizations of premises together with evidence statements and expects the answer to a question in the form of an estimated probability. We conduct an extensive set of experiments, finding that logic-based models outperform out-of-the-box large language models on all reasoning types (causal, evidential, and explaining-away). Our results provide evidence that neuro-symbolic models are a promising direction for improving complex reasoning. We release QUITE and code for training and experiments on Github.

Timo Pierre Schrader, Simon Razniewski, Lukas Lange et al.

Understanding causality is a core aspect of intelligence. The Event Causality Identification with Causal News Corpus Shared Task addresses two aspects of this challenge: Subtask 1 aims at detecting causal relationships in texts, and Subtask 2 requires identifying signal words and the spans that refer to the cause or effect, respectively. Our system, which is based on pre-trained transformers, stacked sequence tagging, and synthetic data augmentation, ranks third in Subtask 1 and wins Subtask 2 with an F1 score of 72.8, corresponding to a margin of 13 pp. to the second-best system.