Given that rich information is hidden behind ubiquitous numbers in text, numerical reasoning over text should be an essential skill of AI systems. To derive precise equations to solve numerical reasoning problems, previous work focused on modeling the structures of equations, and has proposed various structured decoders. Though structure modeling proves to be effective, these structured decoders construct a single equation in a pre-defined autoregressive order, potentially placing an unnecessary restriction on how a model should grasp the reasoning process. Intuitively, humans may have numerous pieces of thoughts popping up in no pre-defined order; thoughts are not limited to the problem at hand, and can even be concerned with other related problems. By comparing diverse thoughts and chaining relevant pieces, humans are less prone to errors. In this paper, we take this inspiration and propose CANTOR, a numerical reasoner that models reasoning steps using a directed acyclic graph where we produce diverse reasoning steps simultaneously without pre-defined decoding dependencies, and compare and chain relevant ones to reach a solution. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of CANTOR under both fully-supervised and weakly-supervised settings.

解决数学单词问题需要对文本中的数量进行演绎推理。各种最近的研究工作主要依赖于序列到序列或序列模型，以生成数学表达式，而无需在给定情况下明确执行数量之间的关系推理。尽管经验上有效，但这种方法通常并未为生成的表达提供解释。在这项工作中，我们将任务视为一个复杂的关系提取问题，提出了一种新的方法，该方法提出了可解释的演绎推理步骤，以迭代构建目标表达式，其中每个步骤涉及两个定义其关系的数量的原始操作。通过在四个基准数据集上进行的大量实验，我们表明该提出的模型显着优于现有的强基础。我们进一步证明，演绎过程不仅提出了更可解释的步骤，而且还使我们能够对需要更复杂推理的问题进行更准确的预测。

查询图形构建旨在通过知识图构建正确的可执行SPARQL以应答自然语言问题。虽然最近的方法通过基于NN的查询图排名进行了良好，但更复杂的问题带来了三个新的挑战：复杂的SPARQL语法，排名的巨大搜索空间，以及当地歧义的嘈杂查询图。本文处理了这些挑战。最初，我们将常见的复杂sparql语法视为包括顶点和边缘的子图，并提出了一个新的统一查询图语法来调整它们。随后，我们提出了一种新的两阶段方法来构建查询图。在第一阶段，通过简单的策略作为候选实例收集了顶级的k $相关的实例（实体，关系等）。在第二阶段，图形生成模型执行分层生成。它首先概述了一个图形结构，其顶点和边缘是空插槽，然后将适当的实例填充到槽中，从而完成查询图。我们的方法将整个查询图的无法忍受的搜索空间分解为经济实惠的操作子空间，同时利用全局结构信息来消除局部歧义。实验结果表明，我们的方法大大提高了最坚定的kgqa基准，在复杂问题上具有出色的性能。

随着未来以数据为中心的决策，对数据库的无缝访问至关重要。关于创建有效的文本到SQL（Text2SQL）模型以访问数据库的数据有广泛的研究。使用自然语言是可以通过有效访问数据库（尤其是对于非技术用户）来弥合数据和结果之间差距的最佳接口之一。它将打开门，并在精通技术技能或不太熟练的查询语言的用户中引起极大的兴趣。即使提出或研究了许多基于深度学习的算法，在现实工作场景中使用自然语言来解决数据查询问题仍然非常具有挑战性。原因是在不同的研究中使用不同的数据集，这带来了其局限性和假设。同时，我们确实缺乏对这些提议的模型及其对其训练的特定数据集的局限性的彻底理解。在本文中，我们试图介绍过去几年研究的24种神经网络模型的整体概述，包括其涉及卷积神经网络，经常性神经网络，指针网络，强化学习，生成模型等的架构。我们还概述11个数据集，这些数据集被广泛用于训练Text2SQL技术的模型。我们还讨论了无缝数据查询中文本2SQL技术的未来应用可能性。

在现实世界中的问题回答场景中，将表格和文本内容均结合的混合形式吸引了越来越多的关注，其中数值推理问题是最典型和最具挑战性的问题之一。现有方法通常采用编码器框架来表示混合内容并生成答案。但是，它无法捕获编码器侧数值，表格架构和文本信息之间的丰富关系。解码器使用一个简单的预定义运算符分类器，该分类器的灵活性不足以处理具有不同表达式的数值推理过程。为了解决这些问题，本文提出了一个\ textbf {re} lational \ textbf {g} raph增强\ textbf {h} ybrid table-text \ textbf {n}带有\ textbf {t textbf {t text} ree decoder（\ textbff recoder（\ textbf） {reghnt}）。它模拟了对表 - 文本混合内容的回答的数值问题，作为表达树的生成任务。此外，我们提出了一种新颖的关系图建模方法，该方法模拟了问题，表和段落之间的对齐方式。我们验证了公开可用的Table-Text混合质量质量质量标准（TAT-QA）的模型。拟议的reghnt显着胜过基线模型，并实现最新结果\脚注{我们在〜\ url {https://github.com/lfy79001/reghnt}}}〜（20222）公开发布了源代码和数据-05-05）。

Hybrid tabular-textual question answering (QA) requires reasoning from heterogeneous information, and the types of reasoning are mainly divided into numerical reasoning and span extraction. Despite being the main challenge of the task compared to extractive QA, current numerical reasoning method simply uses LSTM to autoregressively decode program sequences, and each decoding step produces either an operator or an operand. However, the step-by-step decoding suffers from exposure bias, and the accuracy of program generation drops sharply with progressive decoding. In this paper, we propose a non-autoregressive program generation framework, which facilitates program generation in parallel. Our framework, which independently generates complete program tuples containing both operators and operands, can significantly boost the speed of program generation while addressing the error accumulation issue. Our experiments on the MultiHiertt dataset shows that our model can bring about large improvements (+7.97 EM and +6.38 F1 points) over the strong baseline, establishing the new state-of-the-art performance, while being much faster (21x) in program generation. The performance drop of our method is also significantly smaller than the baseline with increasing numbers of numerical reasoning steps.

Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and is applicable in various fields, including science, engineering, finance, and everyday life. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of solving math problems and proving theorems has garnered significant interest in the fields of machine learning and natural language processing. For example, mathematics serves as a testbed for aspects of reasoning that are challenging for powerful deep learning models, driving new algorithmic and modeling advances. On the other hand, recent advances in large-scale neural language models have opened up new benchmarks and opportunities to use deep learning for mathematical reasoning. In this survey paper, we review the key tasks, datasets, and methods at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and deep learning over the past decade. We also evaluate existing benchmarks and methods, and discuss future research directions in this domain.

语言模型在需要自然语言理解的各种任务上取得了非凡的表现。然而，最先进的模型通常在需要定量推理的任务上挣扎，例如在大学一级解决数学，科学和工程问题。为了帮助缩小这一差距，我们介绍了Minerva，Minerva是一种在一般自然语言数据上鉴定的大型语言模型，并进一步培训了技术内容。该模型在不使用外部工具的情况下实现了技术基准测试的最新性能。我们还评估了我们在需要定量推理的物理学，生物学，化学，经济学和其他科学方面的200多个本科生问题上评估我们的模型，并发现该模型可以正确回答其中几乎三分之一。

Long-form numerical reasoning in financial analysis aims to generate a reasoning program to calculate the correct answer for a given question. Previous work followed a retriever-generator framework, where the retriever selects key facts from a long-form document, and the generator generates a reasoning program based on retrieved facts. However, they treated all facts equally without considering the different contributions of facts with and without numbers. Meanwhile, the program consistency were ignored under supervised training, resulting in lower training accuracy and diversity. To solve these problems, we proposed APOLLO to improve the long-form numerical reasoning framework. For the retriever, we adopt a number-aware negative sampling strategy to enable the retriever to be more discriminative on key numerical facts. For the generator, we design consistency-based reinforcement learning and target program augmentation strategy based on the consistency of program execution results. Experimental results on the FinQA and ConvFinQA leaderboard verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving the new state-of-the-art.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) has improved exponentially in recent years thanks to the development of sequence-to-sequence deep learning technologies such as Transformer-based language models. This advancement has led to more fluent and coherent NLG, leading to improved development in downstream tasks such as abstractive summarization, dialogue generation and data-to-text generation. However, it is also apparent that deep learning based generation is prone to hallucinate unintended text, which degrades the system performance and fails to meet user expectations in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, many studies have been presented in measuring and mitigating hallucinated texts, but these have never been reviewed in a comprehensive manner before. In this survey, we thus provide a broad overview of the research progress and challenges in the hallucination problem in NLG. The survey is organized into two parts: (1) a general overview of metrics, mitigation methods, and future directions; and (2) an overview of task-specific research progress on hallucinations in the following downstream tasks, namely abstractive summarization, dialogue generation, generative question answering, data-to-text generation, machine translation, and visual-language generation. This survey serves to facilitate collaborative efforts among researchers in tackling the challenge of hallucinated texts in NLG.

Multi-hop reading comprehension requires not only the ability to reason over raw text but also the ability to combine multiple evidence. We propose a novel learning approach that helps language models better understand difficult multi-hop questions and perform "complex, compositional" reasoning. Our model first learns to decompose each multi-hop question into several sub-questions by a trainable question decomposer. Instead of answering these sub-questions, we directly concatenate them with the original question and context, and leverage a reading comprehension model to predict the answer in a sequence-to-sequence manner. By using the same language model for these two components, our best seperate/unified t5-base variants outperform the baseline by 7.2/6.1 absolute F1 points on a hard subset of DROP dataset.

Structured tabular data exist across nearly all fields. Reasoning task over these data aims to answer questions or determine the truthiness of hypothesis sentences by understanding the semantic meaning of a table. While previous works have devoted significant efforts to the tabular reasoning task, they always assume there are sufficient labeled data. However, constructing reasoning samples over tables (and related text) is labor-intensive, especially when the reasoning process is complex. When labeled data is insufficient, the performance of models will suffer an unendurable decline. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for unsupervised complex tabular reasoning (UCTR), which generates sufficient and diverse synthetic data with complex logic for tabular reasoning tasks, assuming no human-annotated data at all. We first utilize a random sampling strategy to collect diverse programs of different types and execute them on tables based on a "Program-Executor" module. To bridge the gap between the programs and natural language sentences, we design a powerful "NL-Generator" module to generate natural language sentences with complex logic from these programs. Since a table often occurs with its surrounding texts, we further propose novel "Table-to-Text" and "Text-to-Table" operators to handle joint table-text reasoning scenarios. This way, we can adequately exploit the unlabeled table resources to obtain a well-performed reasoning model under an unsupervised setting. Our experiments cover different tasks (question answering and fact verification) and different domains (general and specific), showing that our unsupervised methods can achieve at most 93% performance compared to supervised models. We also find that it can substantially boost the supervised performance in low-resourced domains as a data augmentation technique. Our code is available at https://github.com/leezythu/UCTR.

我们使用神经语义解析方法解决对大知识图表的弱监督会议问题的问题。我们介绍了一种新的逻辑表单（LF）语法，可以在图中模拟各种查询，同时仍然足够简单以有效地生成监督数据。我们的变换器的模型将类似于输入的JSON的结构，允许我们轻松地结合知识图形和会话环境。该结构化输入转换为嵌入列表，然后馈送到标准注意图层。我们验证了我们的方法，无论是在语法覆盖范围和LF执行准确性方面，在两个公开可用的数据集，CSQA和Chamquestions，都在Wikidata接地。在CSQA上，我们的方法将覆盖范围从80美元的价格增加到96.2 \％$ 75.6 \％$ 75.6 \％$ 75.6 \％$，关于以前的最先进的结果。在CuncQuestions上，我们对最先进的竞争结果实现了竞争力。

Parsing natural language questions into executable logical forms is a useful and interpretable way to perform question answering on structured data such as knowledge bases (KB) or databases (DB). However, existing approaches on semantic parsing cannot adapt to both modalities, as they suffer from the exponential growth of the logical form candidates and can hardly generalize to unseen data. In this work, we propose Uni-Parser, a unified semantic parser for question answering (QA) on both KB and DB. We introduce the primitive (relation and entity in KB, and table name, column name and cell value in DB) as an essential element in our framework. The number of primitives grows linearly with the number of retrieved relations in KB and DB, preventing us from dealing with exponential logic form candidates. We leverage the generator to predict final logical forms by altering and composing topranked primitives with different operations (e.g. select, where, count). With sufficiently pruned search space by a contrastive primitive ranker, the generator is empowered to capture the composition of primitives enhancing its generalization ability. We achieve competitive results on multiple KB and DB QA benchmarks more efficiently, especially in the compositional and zero-shot settings.

Large language models have recently shown promising progress in mathematical reasoning when fine-tuned with human-generated sequences walking through a sequence of solution steps. However, the solution sequences are not formally structured and the resulting model-generated sequences may not reflect the kind of systematic reasoning we might expect an expert human to produce. In this paper, we study how to build stronger reasoning capability in language models using the idea of relational abstractions. We introduce new types of sequences that more explicitly provide an abstract characterization of the transitions through intermediate solution steps to the goal state. We find that models that are supplied with such sequences as prompts can solve tasks with a significantly higher accuracy, and models that are trained to produce such sequences solve problems better than those that are trained with previously used human-generated sequences and other baselines. Our work thus takes several steps toward elucidating and improving how language models perform on tasks requiring multi-step mathematical reasoning.

Recent progress in pre-trained neural language models has significantly improved the performance of many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper we propose a new model architecture DeBERTa (Decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention) that improves the BERT and RoBERTa models using two novel techniques. The first is the disentangled attention mechanism, where each word is represented using two vectors that encode its content and position, respectively, and the attention weights among words are computed using disentangled matrices on their contents and relative positions, respectively. Second, an enhanced mask decoder is used to incorporate absolute positions in the decoding layer to predict the masked tokens in model pre-training. In addition, a new virtual adversarial training method is used for fine-tuning to improve models' generalization. We show that these techniques significantly improve the efficiency of model pre-training and the performance of both natural language understand (NLU) and natural langauge generation (NLG) downstream tasks. Compared to RoBERTa-Large, a DeBERTa model trained on half of the training data performs consistently better on a wide range of NLP tasks, achieving improvements on MNLI by +0.9% (90.2% vs. 91.1%), on SQuAD v2.0 by +2.3% (88.4% vs. 90.7%) and RACE by +3.6% (83.2% vs. 86.8%). Notably, we scale up DeBERTa by training a larger version that consists of 48 Transform layers with 1.5 billion parameters. The significant performance boost makes the single DeBERTa model surpass the human performance on the SuperGLUE benchmark (Wang et al., 2019a) for the first time in terms of macro-average score (89.9 versus 89.8), and the ensemble DeBERTa model sits atop the SuperGLUE leaderboard as of January 6, 2021, outperforming the human baseline by a decent margin (90.3 versus 89.8). The pre-trained DeBERTa models and the source code were released at: https://github.com/microsoft/DeBERTa 1 .

Step-by-step reasoning approaches like chain-of-thought (CoT) have proved to be a very effective technique to induce reasoning capabilities in large language models. However, the success of the CoT approach depends primarily on model size, and often billion parameter-scale models are needed to get CoT to work. In this paper, we propose a knowledge distillation approach, that leverages the step-by-step CoT reasoning capabilities of larger models and distils these reasoning abilities into smaller models. Our approach Decompositional Distillation learns a semantic decomposition of the original problem into a sequence of subproblems and uses it to train two models: a) a problem decomposer that learns to decompose the complex reasoning problem into a sequence of simpler sub-problems and b) a problem solver that uses the intermediate subproblems to solve the overall problem. On a multi-step math word problem dataset (GSM8K), we boost the performance of GPT-2 variants up to 35% when distilled with our approach compared to CoT. We show that using our approach, it is possible to train a GPT-2-large model (775M) that can outperform a 10X larger GPT-3 (6B) model trained using CoT reasoning. Finally, we also demonstrate that our approach of problem decomposition can also be used as an alternative to CoT prompting, which boosts the GPT-3 performance by 40% compared to CoT prompts.

Large language models show improved downstream task performance when prompted to generate step-by-step reasoning to justify their final answers. These reasoning steps greatly improve model interpretability and verification, but objectively studying their correctness (independent of the final answer) is difficult without reliable methods for automatic evaluation. We simply do not know how often the stated reasoning steps actually support the final end task predictions. In this work, we present ROSCOE, a suite of interpretable, unsupervised automatic scores that improve and extend previous text generation evaluation metrics. To evaluate ROSCOE against baseline metrics, we design a typology of reasoning errors and collect synthetic and human evaluation scores on commonly used reasoning datasets. In contrast with existing metrics, ROSCOE can measure semantic consistency, logicality, informativeness, fluency, and factuality - among other traits - by leveraging properties of step-by-step rationales. We empirically verify the strength of our metrics on five human annotated and six programmatically perturbed diagnostics datasets - covering a diverse set of tasks that require reasoning skills and show that ROSCOE can consistently outperform baseline metrics.

知识基础问题回答（KBQA）旨在通过知识库（KB）回答问题。早期研究主要集中于回答有关KB的简单问题，并取得了巨大的成功。但是，他们在复杂问题上的表现远非令人满意。因此，近年来，研究人员提出了许多新颖的方法，研究了回答复杂问题的挑战。在这项调查中，我们回顾了KBQA的最新进展，重点是解决复杂问题，这些问题通常包含多个主题，表达复合关系或涉及数值操作。详细说明，我们从介绍复杂的KBQA任务和相关背景开始。然后，我们描述用于复杂KBQA任务的基准数据集，并介绍这些数据集的构建过程。接下来，我们提出两个复杂KBQA方法的主流类别，即基于语义解析的方法（基于SP）的方法和基于信息检索的方法（基于IR）。具体而言，我们通过流程设计说明了他们的程序，并讨论了它们的主要差异和相似性。之后，我们总结了这两类方法在回答复杂问题时会遇到的挑战，并解释了现有工作中使用的高级解决方案和技术。最后，我们结论并讨论了与复杂的KBQA有关的几个有希望的方向，以进行未来的研究。

Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on downstream tasks, using in-context exemplars or human instructions. Recent works have shown that chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can elicit models to solve complex reasoning tasks, step-by-step. However, the efficacy of prompt-based CoT methods is restricted to very large LMs such as GPT-3 (175B), thus limiting deployability. In this paper, we revisit the fine-tuning approach to enable complex reasoning in smaller LMs, optimized to efficiently perform a specific task. We propose Fine-tune-CoT, a method that leverages the capabilities of very large LMs to generate reasoning samples and teach smaller models via fine-tuning. We evaluate our method on publicly available LMs across a wide range of complex tasks and model sizes. We find that Fine-tune-CoT enables substantial reasoning capability in small models, whereas previous prompt-based baselines exhibit near-random performance. Student models can even outperform the teacher in some tasks while reducing model size requirements by several orders of magnitude. We conduct extensive ablations and sample studies to understand the reasoning capabilities of student models. We also identify several important nuances that have been overlooked in concurrent fine-tuning works on CoT and address them in our analysis.