Houjun Liu

Generalization

# emnlp2024

Compositionality

Getting the right contents.

  • semantic capacity tested — knowing the propositional content
  • operationalization — form => meaning mapping
  • measure of success — generalizing to the right meaning representation for novel expressions (this is non-trivial; multiple compatible generalization maybe applicable depending on context)

task

Given that a model can map certain expressions to their meaning representations, can they also do this for new expressions?

results

  • lexical generalization (fill in new words/pairs) isn’t too hard for new NN

  • but structural generalization (permute syntactical forms) is very hard

  • subclause decomposition

  • phrase id

  • iterative proposional phrase and noun phrase annotation

  • verb phrase normalization

limitations

  • “structure” requires some definition by committing to a particular formalism
  • PTing makes exposing these stems hard

Entity Tracking

Getting the right entity through a conversation.

task

“box world”: putting stuff into boxes

results

  • models that did have a lot of code in pretraining generalized better than those that didn’t
  • this is even shown in minimal pairs of the same architecture with more code