Nasrin Mostafazadeh


2020

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GLUCOSE: GeneraLized and COntextualized Story Explanations
Nasrin Mostafazadeh | Aditya Kalyanpur | Lori Moon | David Buchanan | Lauren Berkowitz | Or Biran | Jennifer Chu-Carroll
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

When humans read or listen, they make implicit commonsense inferences that frame their understanding of what happened and why. As a step toward AI systems that can build similar mental models, we introduce GLUCOSE, a large-scale dataset of implicit commonsense causal knowledge, encoded as causal mini-theories about the world, each grounded in a narrative context. To construct GLUCOSE, we drew on cognitive psychology to identify ten dimensions of causal explanation, focusing on events, states, motivations, and emotions. Each GLUCOSE entry includes a story-specific causal statement paired with an inference rule generalized from the statement. This paper details two concrete contributions. First, we present our platform for effectively crowdsourcing GLUCOSE data at scale, which uses semi-structured templates to elicit causal explanations. Using this platform, we collected a total of ~670K specific statements and general rules that capture implicit commonsense knowledge about everyday situations. Second, we show that existing knowledge resources and pretrained language models do not include or readily predict GLUCOSE’s rich inferential content. However, when state-of-the-art neural models are trained on this knowledge, they can start to make commonsense inferences on unseen stories that match humans’ mental models.

2019

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Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations)
Waleed Ammar | Annie Louis | Nasrin Mostafazadeh
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations)

2018

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Tackling the Story Ending Biases in The Story Cloze Test
Rishi Sharma | James Allen | Omid Bakhshandeh | Nasrin Mostafazadeh
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

The Story Cloze Test (SCT) is a recent framework for evaluating story comprehension and script learning. There have been a variety of models tackling the SCT so far. Although the original goal behind the SCT was to require systems to perform deep language understanding and commonsense reasoning for successful narrative understanding, some recent models could perform significantly better than the initial baselines by leveraging human-authorship biases discovered in the SCT dataset. In order to shed some light on this issue, we have performed various data analysis and analyzed a variety of top performing models presented for this task. Given the statistics we have aggregated, we have designed a new crowdsourcing scheme that creates a new SCT dataset, which overcomes some of the biases. We benchmark a few models on the new dataset and show that the top-performing model on the original SCT dataset fails to keep up its performance. Our findings further signify the importance of benchmarking NLP systems on various evolving test sets.

2017

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Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Linking Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics
Michael Roth | Nasrin Mostafazadeh | Nathanael Chambers | Annie Louis
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Linking Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics

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LSDSem 2017 Shared Task: The Story Cloze Test
Nasrin Mostafazadeh | Michael Roth | Annie Louis | Nathanael Chambers | James Allen
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Linking Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics

The LSDSem’17 shared task is the Story Cloze Test, a new evaluation for story understanding and script learning. This test provides a system with a four-sentence story and two possible endings, and the system must choose the correct ending to the story. Successful narrative understanding (getting closer to human performance of 100%) requires systems to link various levels of semantics to commonsense knowledge. A total of eight systems participated in the shared task, with a variety of approaches including.

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Image-Grounded Conversations: Multimodal Context for Natural Question and Response Generation
Nasrin Mostafazadeh | Chris Brockett | Bill Dolan | Michel Galley | Jianfeng Gao | Georgios Spithourakis | Lucy Vanderwende
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The popularity of image sharing on social media and the engagement it creates between users reflect the important role that visual context plays in everyday conversations. We present a novel task, Image Grounded Conversations (IGC), in which natural-sounding conversations are generated about a shared image. To benchmark progress, we introduce a new multiple reference dataset of crowd-sourced, event-centric conversations on images. IGC falls on the continuum between chit-chat and goal-directed conversation models, where visual grounding constrains the topic of conversation to event-driven utterances. Experiments with models trained on social media data show that the combination of visual and textual context enhances the quality of generated conversational turns. In human evaluation, the gap between human performance and that of both neural and retrieval architectures suggests that multi-modal IGC presents an interesting challenge for dialog research.

2016

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CaTeRS: Causal and Temporal Relation Scheme for Semantic Annotation of Event Structures
Nasrin Mostafazadeh | Alyson Grealish | Nathanael Chambers | James Allen | Lucy Vanderwende
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Events

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Story Cloze Evaluator: Vector Space Representation Evaluation by Predicting What Happens Next
Nasrin Mostafazadeh | Lucy Vanderwende | Wen-tau Yih | Pushmeet Kohli | James Allen
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Evaluating Vector-Space Representations for NLP

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A Corpus and Cloze Evaluation for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories
Nasrin Mostafazadeh | Nathanael Chambers | Xiaodong He | Devi Parikh | Dhruv Batra | Lucy Vanderwende | Pushmeet Kohli | James Allen
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Visual Storytelling
Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang | Francis Ferraro | Nasrin Mostafazadeh | Ishan Misra | Aishwarya Agrawal | Jacob Devlin | Ross Girshick | Xiaodong He | Pushmeet Kohli | Dhruv Batra | C. Lawrence Zitnick | Devi Parikh | Lucy Vanderwende | Michel Galley | Margaret Mitchell
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Generating Natural Questions About an Image
Nasrin Mostafazadeh | Ishan Misra | Jacob Devlin | Margaret Mitchell | Xiaodong He | Lucy Vanderwende
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2015

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A Survey of Current Datasets for Vision and Language Research
Francis Ferraro | Nasrin Mostafazadeh | Ting-Hao Huang | Lucy Vanderwende | Jacob Devlin | Michel Galley | Margaret Mitchell
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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SemEval-2015 Task 5: QA TempEval - Evaluating Temporal Information Understanding with Question Answering
Hector Llorens | Nathanael Chambers | Naushad UzZaman | Nasrin Mostafazadeh | James Allen | James Pustejovsky
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015)