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Do Neural Language Representations Learn Physical Commonsense? (arxiv.org)
2 points by sel1 on Aug 10, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They tested whether language models trained on huge amounts of text grasp physical commonsense: what objects are like, what you can do with them, and what one fact implies. Across over 200,000 human annotations, the models mostly learn only links spelled out in text.

Abstract

Humans understand language based on the rich background knowledge about how the physical world works, which in turn allows us to reason about the physical world through language. In addition to the properties of objects (e.g., boats require fuel) and their affordances, i.e., the actions that are applicable to them (e.g., boats can be driven), we can also reason about if-then inferences between what properties of objects imply the kind of actions that are applicable to them (e.g., that if we can drive something then it likely requires fuel). In this paper, we investigate the extent to which state-of-the-art neural language representations, trained on a vast amount of natural language text, demonstrate physical commonsense reasoning. While recent advancements of neural language models have demonstrated strong performance on various types of natural language inference tasks, our study based on a dataset of over 200k newly collected annotations suggests that neural language representations still only learn associations that are explicitly written down.

Maxwell Forbes, Ari Holtzman, Yejin Choi
arXiv:1908.02899 · cs.CL · submitted Aug 8, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Published in The Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019)

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