ChainNet: Structured Metaphor and Metonymy in WordNet

The senses of a word exhibit rich internal structure. In a typical lexicon, this structure is overlooked: a word's senses are encoded as a list without inter-sense relations. We present ChainNet, a lexical resource which for the first time explicitly identifies these structures. ChainNet expresses how senses in the Open English Wordnet are derived from one another: every nominal sense of a word is either connected to another sense by metaphor or metonymy, or is disconnected in the case of homonymy. Because WordNet senses are linked to resources which capture information about their meaning, ChainNet represents the first dataset of grounded metaphor and metonymy.

Common Ground Tracking in Multimodal Dialogue

Within Dialogue Modeling research in AI and NLP, considerable attention has been spent on ``dialogue state tracking'' (DST), which is the ability to update the representations of the speaker's needs at each turn in the dialogue by taking into account the past dialogue moves and history. Less studied but just as important to dialogue modeling, however, is ``common ground tracking'' (CGT), which identifies the shared belief space held by all of the participants in a task-oriented dialogue: the task-relevant propositions all participants accept as true. In this paper we present a method for automatically identifying the current set of shared beliefs and ``questions under discussion'' (QUDs) of a group with a shared goal. We annotate a dataset of multimodal interactions in a shared physical space with speech transcriptions, prosodic features, gestures, actions, and facets of collaboration, and operationalize these features for use in a deep neural model to predict moves toward construction of common ground. Model outputs cascade into a set of formal closure rules derived from situated evidence and belief axioms and update operations. We empirically assess the contribution of each feature type toward successful construction of common ground relative to ground truth, establishing a benchmark in this novel, challenging task.

An Abstract Specification of VoxML as an Annotation Language

VoxML is a modeling language used to map natural language expressions into real-time visualizations using commonsense semantic knowledge of objects and events. Its utility has been demonstrated in embodied simulation environments and in agent-object interactions in situated multimodal human-agent collaboration and communication. It introduces the notion of object affordance (both Gibsonian and Telic) from HRI and robotics, as well as the concept of habitat (an object's context of use) for interactions between a rational agent and an object. This paper aims to specify VoxML as an annotation language in general abstract terms. It then shows how it works on annotating linguistic data that express visually perceptible human-object interactions. The annotation structures thus generated will be interpreted against the enriched minimal model created by VoxML as a modeling language while supporting the modeling purposes of VoxML linguistically.

Causal schema induction for knowledge discovery

Making sense of familiar yet new situations typically involves making generalizations about causal schemas, stories that help humans reason about event sequences. Reasoning about events includes identifying cause and effect relations shared across event instances, a process we refer to as causal schema induction. Statistical schema induction systems may leverage structural knowledge encoded in discourse or the causal graphs associated with event meaning, however resources to study such causal structure are few in number and limited in size. In this work, we investigate how to apply schema induction models to the task of knowledge discovery for enhanced search of English-language news texts. To tackle the problem of data scarcity, we present Torquestra, a manually curated dataset of text-graph-schema units integrating temporal, event, and causal structures. We benchmark our dataset on three knowledge discovery tasks, building and evaluating models for each. Results show that systems that harness causal structure are effective at identifying texts sharing similar causal meaning components rather than relying on lexical cues alone. We make our dataset and models available for research purposes.

Representing Inferences and their Lexicalization

We have recently begun a project to develop a more effective and efficient way to marshal inferences from background knowledge to facilitate deep natural language understanding. The meaning of a word is taken to be the entities, predications, presuppositions, and potential inferences that it adds to an ongoing situation. As words compose, the minimal model in the situation evolves to limit and direct inference. At this point we have developed our computational architecture and implemented it on real text. Our focus has been on proving the feasibility of our design.

Designing Multimodal Datasets for NLP Challenges

In this paper, we argue that the design and development of multimodal datasets for natural language processing (NLP) challenges should be enhanced in two significant respects: to more broadly represent commonsense semantic inferences; and to better reflect the dynamics of actions and events, through a substantive alignment of textual and visual information. We identify challenges and tasks that are reflective of linguistic and cognitive competencies that humans have when speaking and reasoning, rather than merely the performance of systems on isolated tasks. We introduce the distinction between challenge-based tasks and competence-based performance, and describe a diagnostic dataset, Recipe-to-Video Questions (R2VQ), designed for testing competence-based comprehension over a multimodal recipe collection (http://r2vq.org/). The corpus contains detailed annotation supporting such inferencing tasks and facilitating a rich set of question families that we use to evaluate NLP systems.

Neurosymbolic AI for Situated Language Understanding

In recent years, data-intensive AI, particularly the domain of natural language processing and understanding, has seen significant progress driven by the advent of large datasets and deep neural networks that have sidelined more classic AI approaches to the field. These systems can apparently demonstrate sophisticated linguistic understanding or generation capabilities, but often fail to transfer their skills to situations they have not encountered before. We argue that computational situated grounding provides a solution to some of these learning challenges by creating situational representations that both serve as a formal model of the salient phenomena, and contain rich amounts of exploitable, task-appropriate data for training new, flexible computational models. Our model reincorporates some ideas of classic AI into a framework of neurosymbolic intelligence, using multimodal contextual modeling of interactive situations, events, and object properties. We discuss how situated grounding provides diverse data and multiple levels of modeling for a variety of AI learning challenges, including learning how to interact with object affordances, learning semantics for novel structures and configurations, and transferring such learned knowledge to new objects and situations.

Situated Multimodal Control of a Mobile Robot: Navigation through a Virtual Environment

We present a new interface for controlling a navigation robot in novel environments using coordinated gesture and language. We use a TurtleBot3 robot with a LIDAR and a camera, an embodied simulation of what the robot has encountered while exploring, and a cross-platform bridge facilitating generic communication. A human partner can deliver instructions to the robot using spoken English and gestures relative to the simulated environment, to guide the robot through navigation tasks.

COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction and Drug Repurposing Report Generation

To combat COVID-19, clinicians and scientists all need to digest the vast amount of relevant biomedical knowledge in literature to understand the disease mechanism and the related biological functions. We have developed a novel and comprehensive knowledge discovery framework, COVID-KG, which leverages novel semantic representation and external ontologies to represent text and images in the input literature data, and then performs various extraction components to extract fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements (entities, relations and events). We then exploit the constructed multimedia KGs for question answering and report generation, using drug repurposing as a case study. Our framework also provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures and knowledge subgraphs as evidence. All of the data, KGs, resources, and shared services are publicly available.

Exploration and Discovery of the COVID-19 Literature through Semantic Visualization

We are developing semantic visualization techniques in order to enhance exploration and enable discovery over large datasets of complex networks of relations. Semantic visualization is a method of enabling exploration and discovery over large datasets of complex networks by exploiting the semantics of the relations in them. This involves (i) NLP to extract named entities, relations and knowledge graphs from the original data; (ii) indexing the output and creating representations for all relevant entities and relations that can be visualized in many different ways, e.g., as tag clouds, heat maps, graphs, etc.; (iii) applying parameter reduction operations to the extracted relations, creating "relation containers", or functional entities that can also be visualized using the same methods, allowing the visualization of multiple relations, partial pathways, and exploration across multiple dimensions. Our hope is that this will enable the discovery of novel inferences over relations in complex data that otherwise would go unnoticed. We have applied this to analysis of the recently released CORD-19 dataset.