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Can we teach natural language understanding models to track their beliefs through intermediate points in text? We propose a representation learning framework called breakpoint modeling that allows for learning of this type. Given any text encoder and data marked with intermediate states (breakpoints) along with corresponding textual queries viewed as true/false propositions (i.e., the candidate beliefs of a model, consisting of information changing through time) our approach trains models in an efficient and end-to-end fashion to build intermediate representations that facilitate teaching and direct querying of beliefs at arbitrary points alongside solving other end tasks. To show the benefit of our approach, we experiment with a diverse set of NLU tasks including relational reasoning on CLUTRR and narrative understanding on bAbI. Using novel belief prediction tasks for both tasks, we show the benefit of our main breakpoint transformer, based on T5, over conventional representation learning approaches in terms of processing efficiency, prediction accuracy and prediction consistency, all with minimal to no effect on corresponding QA end tasks. To show the feasibility of incorporating our belief tracker into more complex reasoning pipelines, we also obtain SOTA performance on the three-tiered reasoning challenge for the TRIP benchmark (around 23-32% absolute improvement on Tasks 2-3)., EMNLP 2022

Key Point Analysis(KPA) is a relatively new task in NLP that combines summarization and classification by extracting argumentative key points (KPs) for a topic from a collection of texts and categorizing their closeness to the different arguments. In our work, we focus on the legal domain and develop methods that identify and extract KPs from premises derived from texts of judgments. The first method is an adaptation to an existing state-of-the-art method, and the two others are new methods that we developed from scratch. We present our methods and examples of their outputs, as well a comparison between them. The full evaluation of our results is done in the matching task -- match between the generated KPs to arguments (premises).

Analogy-making gives rise to reasoning, abstraction, flexible categorization and counterfactual inference -- abilities lacking in even the best AI systems today. Much research has suggested that analogies are key to non-brittle systems that can adapt to new domains. Despite their importance, analogies received little attention in the NLP community, with most research focusing on simple word analogies. Work that tackled more complex analogies relied heavily on manually constructed, hard-to-scale input representations. In this work, we explore a more realistic, challenging setup: our input is a pair of natural language procedural texts, describing a situation or a process (e.g., how the heart works/how a pump works). Our goal is to automatically extract entities and their relations from the text and find a mapping between the different domains based on relational similarity (e.g., blood is mapped to water). We develop an interpretable, scalable algorithm and demonstrate that it identifies the correct mappings 87% of the time for procedural texts and 94% for stories from cognitive-psychology literature. We show it can extract analogies from a large dataset of procedural texts, achieving 79% precision (analogy prevalence in data: 3%). Lastly, we demonstrate that our algorithm is robust to paraphrasing the input texts., Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2022 main conference (long paper)