Retrieval Augmentation for Commonsense Reasoning: A Unified Approach
This work addresses the problem of improving commonsense reasoning for AI systems by providing a retrieval-augmented approach, though it is incremental as it builds on existing retrieval methods.
The paper tackled the problem of applying retrieval-augmented methods to commonsense reasoning by addressing challenges like the lack of a large-scale corpus and effective retriever, resulting in a unified framework (RACo) that achieved new state-of-the-art performance on the CommonGen and CREAK leaderboards.
A common thread of retrieval-augmented methods in the existing literature focuses on retrieving encyclopedic knowledge, such as Wikipedia, which facilitates well-defined entity and relation spaces that can be modeled. However, applying such methods to commonsense reasoning tasks faces two unique challenges, i.e., the lack of a general large-scale corpus for retrieval and a corresponding effective commonsense retriever. In this paper, we systematically investigate how to leverage commonsense knowledge retrieval to improve commonsense reasoning tasks. We proposed a unified framework of retrieval-augmented commonsense reasoning (called RACo), including a newly constructed commonsense corpus with over 20 million documents and novel strategies for training a commonsense retriever. We conducted experiments on four different commonsense reasoning tasks. Extensive evaluation results showed that our proposed RACo can significantly outperform other knowledge-enhanced method counterparts, achieving new SoTA performance on the CommonGen and CREAK leaderboards.