Portrait de Siva Reddy

Siva Reddy

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur adjoint, McGill University, École d'informatique et Département de linguistique
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage profond
Raisonnement
Traitement du langage naturel

Biographie

Siva Reddy est professeur adjoint en informatique et linguistique à l’Université McGill. Ses travaux portent sur les algorithmes qui permettent aux ordinateurs de comprendre et de traiter les langues humaines. Il a fait ses études postdoctorales avec le Stanford NLP Group. Son expertise inclut la construction de symboliques linguistiques et induites et de modèles d’apprentissage profond pour le langage.

Étudiants actuels

Doctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Doctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Stagiaire de recherche - UNIVERSITÄT DES SAARLANDES
Doctorat - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - Polytechnique
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Postdoctorat - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Cambridge University
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill

Publications

The StatCan Dialogue Dataset: Retrieving Data Tables through Conversations with Genuine Intents
Xing Han Lu
Harm de Vries
FaithDial: A Faithful Benchmark for Information-Seeking Dialogue
Nouha Dziri
Ehsan Kamalloo
Sivan Milton
Osmar Zaiane
Mo Yu
Edoardo Ponti
Abstract The goal of information-seeking dialogue is to respond to seeker queries with natural language utterances that are grounded on know… (voir plus)ledge sources. However, dialogue systems often produce unsupported utterances, a phenomenon known as hallucination. To mitigate this behavior, we adopt a data-centric solution and create FaithDial, a new benchmark for hallucination-free dialogues, by editing hallucinated responses in the Wizard of Wikipedia (WoW) benchmark. We observe that FaithDial is more faithful than WoW while also maintaining engaging conversations. We show that FaithDial can serve as training signal for: i) a hallucination critic, which discriminates whether an utterance is faithful or not, and boosts the performance by 12.8 F1 score on the BEGIN benchmark compared to existing datasets for dialogue coherence; ii) high-quality dialogue generation. We benchmark a series of state-of-the-art models and propose an auxiliary contrastive objective that achieves the highest level of faithfulness and abstractiveness based on several automated metrics. Further, we find that the benefits of FaithDial generalize to zero-shot transfer on other datasets, such as CMU-Dog and TopicalChat. Finally, human evaluation reveals that responses generated by models trained on FaithDial are perceived as more interpretable, cooperative, and engaging.
Post-hoc Interpretability for Neural NLP: A Survey
Andreas Madsen
Evaluating the Faithfulness of Importance Measures in NLP by Recursively Masking Allegedly Important Tokens and Retraining
Andreas Madsen
Nicholas Meade
Vaibhav Adlakha
To explain NLP models a popular approach is to use importance measures, such as attention, which inform input tokens are important for makin… (voir plus)g a prediction. However, an open question is how well these explanations accurately reflect a model's logic, a property called faithfulness. To answer this question, we propose Recursive ROAR, a new faithfulness metric. This works by recursively masking allegedly important tokens and then retraining the model. The principle is that this should result in worse model performance compared to masking random tokens. The result is a performance curve given a masking-ratio. Furthermore, we propose a summarizing metric using relative area-between-curves (RACU), which allows for easy comparison across papers, models, and tasks. We evaluate 4 different importance measures on 8 different datasets, using both LSTM-attention models and RoBERTa models. We find that the faithfulness of importance measures is both model-dependent and task-dependent. This conclusion contradicts previous evaluations in both computer vision and faithfulness of attention literature.
Does Entity Abstraction Help Generative Transformers Reason?
Nicolas Gontier
We study the utility of incorporating entity type abstractions into pre-trained Transformers and test these methods on four NLP tasks requir… (voir plus)ing different forms of logical reasoning: (1) compositional language understanding with text-based relational reasoning (CLUTRR), (2) abductive reasoning (ProofWriter), (3) multi-hop question answering (HotpotQA), and (4) conversational question answering (CoQA). We propose and empirically explore three ways to add such abstraction: (i) as additional input embeddings, (ii) as a separate sequence to encode, and (iii) as an auxiliary prediction task for the model. Overall, our analysis demonstrates that models with abstract entity knowledge performs better than without it. The best abstraction aware models achieved an overall accuracy of 88.8% and 91.8% compared to the baseline model achieving 62.9% and 89.8% on CLUTRR and ProofWriter respectively. However, for HotpotQA and CoQA, we find that F1 scores improve by only 0.5% on average. Our results suggest that the benefit of explicit abstraction is significant in formally defined logical reasoning settings requiring many reasoning hops, but point to the notion that it is less beneficial for NLP tasks having less formal logical structure.
Few-shot Question Generation for Personalized Feedback in Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Devang Kulshreshtha
Muhammad Shayan
Robert Belfer
Iulian V. Serban
Ekaterina Kochmar
Compositional Generalization in Dependency Parsing
An Empirical Survey of the Effectiveness of Debiasing Techniques for Pre-trained Language Models
Nicholas Meade
Elinor Poole-Dayan
Recent work has shown pre-trained language models capture social biases from the large amounts of text they are trained on. This has attract… (voir plus)ed attention to developing techniques that mitigate such biases. In this work, we perform an empirical survey of five recently proposed bias mitigation techniques: Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA), Dropout, Iterative Nullspace Projection, Self-Debias, and SentenceDebias. We quantify the effectiveness of each technique using three intrinsic bias benchmarks while also measuring the impact of these techniques on a model’s language modeling ability, as well as its performance on downstream NLU tasks. We experimentally find that: (1) Self-Debias is the strongest debiasing technique, obtaining improved scores on all bias benchmarks; (2) Current debiasing techniques perform less consistently when mitigating non-gender biases; And (3) improvements on bias benchmarks such as StereoSet and CrowS-Pairs by using debiasing strategies are often accompanied by a decrease in language modeling ability, making it difficult to determine whether the bias mitigation was effective.
Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions
Benno Krojer
Vaibhav Adlakha
Vibhav Vineet
Yash Goyal
Edoardo Ponti
The ability to integrate context, including perceptual and temporal cues, plays a pivotal role in grounding the meaning of a linguistic utte… (voir plus)rance. In order to measure to what extent current vision-and-language models master this ability, we devise a new multimodal challenge, Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions (ImageCoDe). In particular, models are tasked with retrieving the correct image from a set of 10 minimally contrastive candidates based on a contextual description.As such, each description contains only the details that help distinguish between images.Because of this, descriptions tend to be complex in terms of syntax and discourse and require drawing pragmatic inferences. Images are sourced from both static pictures and video frames.We benchmark several state-of-the-art models, including both cross-encoders such as ViLBERT and bi-encoders such as CLIP, on ImageCoDe.Our results reveal that these models dramatically lag behind human performance: the best variant achieves an accuracy of 20.9 on video frames and 59.4 on static pictures, compared with 90.8 in humans.Furthermore, we experiment with new model variants that are better equipped to incorporate visual and temporal context into their representations, which achieve modest gains. Our hope is that ImageCoDE will foster progress in grounded language understanding by encouraging models to focus on fine-grained visual differences.
The Power of Prompt Tuning for Low-Resource Semantic Parsing
Nathan Schucher
Harm de Vries
Prompt tuning has recently emerged as an effective method for adapting pre-trained language models to a number of language understanding and… (voir plus) generation tasks. In this paper, we investigate prompt tuning for semantic parsing—the task of mapping natural language utterances onto formal meaning representations. On the low-resource splits of Overnight and TOPv2, we find that a prompt tuned T5-xl significantly outperforms its fine-tuned counterpart, as well as strong GPT-3 and BART baselines. We also conduct ablation studies across different model scales and target representations, finding that, with increasing model scale, prompt tuned T5 models improve at generating target representations that are far from the pre-training distribution.
Using Interactive Feedback to Improve the Accuracy and Explainability of Question Answering Systems Post-Deployment
Zichao Li
Prakhar Sharma
Xing Han Lu
On the Origin of Hallucinations in Conversational Models: Is it the Datasets or the Models?
Nouha Dziri
Sivan Milton
Mo Yu
Osmar R Zaiane
Knowledge-grounded conversational models are known to suffer from producing factually invalid statements, a phenomenon commonly called hallu… (voir plus)cination. In this work, we investigate the underlying causes of this phenomenon: is hallucination due to the training data, or to the models? We conduct a comprehensive human study on both existing knowledge-grounded conversational benchmarks and several state-of-the-art models. Our study reveals that the standard benchmarks consist of > 60% hallucinated responses, leading to models that not only hallucinate but even amplify hallucinations. Our findings raise important questions on the quality of existing datasets and models trained using them. We make our annotations publicly available for future research.