Question: Is Aristo just some modern NLP model (ex. BERT) finetuned od data specific for this task?
Evidence: The current configuration of Aristo comprises of eight solvers, described shortly, each of which attempts to answer a multiple choice question. To study particular phenomena and develop solvers, the project has created larger datasets to amplify and study different problems, resulting in 10 new datasets and 5 large knowledge resources for the community.
The solvers can be loosely grouped into:
Statistical and information retrieval methods
Reasoning methods
Large-scale language model methods
Over the life of the project, the relative importance of the methods has shifted towards large-scale language methods.
The field of NLP has advanced substantially with the advent of large-scale language models such as ELMo (BID6), ULMFit (BID37), GPT (BID38), BERT (BID7), and RoBERTa (BID8). These models are trained to perform various language prediction tasks such as predicting a missing word or the next sentence, using large amounts of text (e.g., BERT was trained on Wikipedia + the Google Book Corpus of 10,000 books). They can also be fine-tuned to new language prediction tasks, such as question-answering, and have been remarkably successful in the few months that they have been available.
We apply BERT to multiple choice questions by treating the task as classification: Given a question $q$ with answer options $a_{i}$ and optional background knowledge $K_{i}$, we provide it to BERT as:
[CLS] $K_i$ [SEP] $q$ [SEP] $a_{i}$ [SEP]
The AristoBERT solver uses three methods to apply BERT more effectively. First, we retrieve and supply background knowledge along with the question when using BERT. This provides the potential for BERT to “read” that background knowledge and apply it to the question, although the exact nature of how it uses background knowledge is more complex and less interpretable. Second, we fine-tune BERT using a curriculum of several datasets, including some that are not science related. Finally, we ensemble different variants of BERT together.
The current configuration of Aristo comprises of eight solvers, described shortly, each of which attempts to answer a multiple choice question. To study particular phenomena and develop solvers, the project has created larger datasets to amplify and study different problems, resulting in 10 new datasets and 5 large knowledge resources for the community.

The solvers can be loosely grouped into:

Statistical and information retrieval methods

Reasoning methods

Large-scale language model methods
Over the life of the project, the relative importance of the methods has shifted towards large-scale language methods.
The field of NLP has advanced substantially with the advent of large-scale language models such as ELMo (BID6), ULMFit (BID37), GPT (BID38), BERT (BID7), and RoBERTa (BID8). These models are trained to perform various language prediction tasks such as predicting a missing word or the next sentence, using large amounts of text (e.g., BERT was trained on Wikipedia + the Google Book Corpus of 10,000 books). They can also be fine-tuned to new language prediction tasks, such as question-answering, and have been remarkably successful in the few months that they have been available.
We apply BERT to multiple choice questions by treating the task as classification: Given a question $q$ with answer options $a_{i}$ and optional background knowledge $K_{i}$, we provide it to BERT as:

[CLS] $K_i$ [SEP] $q$ [SEP] $a_{i}$ [SEP]
The AristoBERT solver uses three methods to apply BERT more effectively. First, we retrieve and supply background knowledge along with the question when using BERT. This provides the potential for BERT to “read” that background knowledge and apply it to the question, although the exact nature of how it uses background knowledge is more complex and less interpretable. Second, we fine-tune BERT using a curriculum of several datasets, including some that are not science related. Finally, we ensemble different variants of BERT together.
Answer: Yes.