prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. Is WordNet useful for taxonomic reasoning for this task?
Context 1: Introduction
Automatically answering questions, especially in the open-domain setting (i e , where minimal or no contextual knowledge is explicitly provided), requires bringing to bear considerable amount of background knowledge and reasoning abilities  For example, knowing the answers to the two questions in Figure FIGREF1 requires identifying a specific ISA relation (i e , that cooking is a type of learned behavior) as well as recalling the definition of a concept (i e , that global warming is defined as a worldwide increase in temperature)  In the multiple-choice setting, which is the variety of question-answering (QA) that we focus on in this paper, there is also pragmatic reasoning involved in selecting optimal answer choices (e g , while greenhouse effect might in some other context be a reasonable answer to the second question in Figure FIGREF1, global warming is a preferable candidate) 
Recent successes in QA, driven largely by the creation of new resources BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5 and advances in model pre-training BIBREF6, BIBREF7, raise a natural question: do state-of-the-art multiple-choice QA (MCQA) models that excel at standard tasks really have basic knowledge and reasoning skills?
Most existing MCQA datasets are constructed through either expensive crowd-sourcing BIBREF8 or hand engineering effort, in the former case making it possible to collect large amounts of data at the cost of losing systematic control over the semantics of the target questions  Hence, doing a controlled experiment to answer such a question for QA is difficult given a lack of targeted challenge datasets 
Having definitive empirical evidence of model competence on any given phenomenon requires constructing a wide range of systematic tests  For example, in measuring competence of definitions, not only do we want to see that the model can handle individual questions such as Figure FIGREF1 1 inside of benchmark tasks, but that it can answer a wider range of questions that exhaustively cover a broad set of concepts and question perturbations (i e , systematic adjustments to how the questions are constructed)  The same applies to ISA reasoning; not only is it important to recognize in the question in Figure FIGREF1 1 that cooking is a learned behavior, but also that cooking is a general type of behavior or, through a few more inferential steps, a type of human activity 
In this paper, we look at systematically constructing such tests by exploiting the vast amounts of structured information contained in various types of expert knowledge such as knowledge graphs and lexical taxonomies  Our general methodology works as illustrated in Figure FIGREF1: given any MCQA model trained on a set of benchmark tasks, we systematically generate a set of synthetic dataset probes (i e , MCQA renderings of the target information) from information in expert knowledge sources  We then use these probes to ask two empirical questions: 1) how well do models trained on benchmark tasks perform on these probing tasks and; 2) can such models be re-trained to master new challenges with minimal performance loss on their original tasks?
While our methodology is amenable to any knowledge source and set of models/benchmark tasks, we focus on probing state-of-the-art transformer models BIBREF7, BIBREF9 in the domain of science MCQA  For sources of expert knowledge, we use WordNet, a comprehensive lexical ontology, and other publicly available dictionary resources  We devise probes that measure model competence in definition and taxonomic knowledge in different settings (including hypernymy, hyponymy, and synonymy detection, and word sense disambiguation)  This choice is motivated by fact that the science domain is considered particularly challenging for QA BIBREF10, BIBREF11, BIBREF12, and existing science benchmarks are known to involve widespread use of such knowledge (see BIBREF1, BIBREF13 for analysis), which is also arguably fundamental to more complex forms of reasoning 
We show that accurately probing QA models via synthetic datasets is not straightforward, as unexpected artifacts can easily arise in such data  This motivates our carefully constructed baselines and close data inspection to ensure probe quality 
Our results confirm that transformer-based QA models have a remarkable ability to recognize certain types of knowledge captured in our probes—even without additional fine-tuning  Such models can even outperform strong task-specific models trained directly on our probing tasks (e g , on definitions, our best model achieves 77% test accuracy without specialized training, as opposed to 51% for a task-specific LSTM-based model)  We also show that the same models can be effectively re-fine-tuned on small samples (even 100 examples) of probe data, and that high performance on the probes tends to correlate with a smaller drop in the model's performance on the original QA task 
Our comprehensive assessment reveals several interesting nuances to the overall positive trend  For example, the performance of even the best QA models degrades substantially on our hyponym probes (by 8-15%) when going from 1-hop links to 2-hops  Further, the accuracy of even our best models on the WordNetQA probe drops by 14-44% under our cluster-based analysis, which assesses whether a model knows several facts about each individual concept, rather than just being good at answering isolated questions  State-of-the-art QA models thus have much room to improve even in some fundamental building blocks, namely definitions and taxonomic hierarchies, of more complex forms of reasoning 
Related Work
We follow recent work on constructing challenge datasets for probing neural models, which has primarily focused on the task of natural language inference (NLI) BIBREF14, BIBREF15, BIBREF16, BIBREF17, BIBREF18  Most of this work looks at constructing data through adversarial generation methods, which have also been found useful for creating stronger models BIBREF19  There has also been work on using synthetic data of the type we consider in this paper BIBREF20, BIBREF21, BIBREF22  We closely follow the methodology of BIBREF22, who use hand-constructed linguistic fragments to probe NLI models and study model re-training using a variant of the inoculation by fine-tuning strategy of BIBREF23  In contrast, we focus on probing open-domain MCQA models (see BIBREF24 for a related study in the reading comprehension setting) as well as constructing data from much larger sources of structured knowledge 
Our main study focuses on probing the BERT model and fine-tuning approach of BIBREF7, and other variants thereof, which are all based on the transformer architecture of BIBREF25  Related to our efforts, there have been recent studies into the types of relational knowledge contained in large-scale knowledge models BIBREF26, BIBREF27, BIBREF28, which, similar to our work, probe models using structured knowledge sources  This prior work, however, primarily focuses on unearthing the knowledge contained in the underlying language models as is without further training, using simple (single token) cloze-style probing tasks and templates (similar to what we propose in Section SECREF3)  In contrast, we focus on understanding the knowledge contained in language models after they have been trained for a QA end-task using benchmark datasets in which such knowledge is expected to be widespread  Further, our evaluation is done before and after these models are fine-tuned on our probe QA tasks, using a more complex set of QA templates and target inferences 
The use of lexical resources and knowledge graphs such as WordNet to construct datasets has a long history, and has recently appeared in work on adversarial attacks BIBREF14, BIBREF29 and general task construction BIBREF30, BIBREF31  In the area of MCQA, there is related work on constructing questions from tuples BIBREF32, BIBREF3, both of which involve standard crowd annotation to elicit question-answer pairs (see also BIBREF33, BIBREF34)  In contrast to this work, we focus on generating data in an entirely automatic fashion, which obviates the need for expensive annotation and gives us the flexibility to construct much larger datasets that control a rich set of semantic aspects of the target questions 
Dataset Probes and Construction
Our probing methodology starts by constructing challenge datasets (Figure FIGREF1, yellow box) from a target set of knowledge resources  Each of our probing datasets consists of multiple-choice questions that include a question $\textbf {q}$ and a set of answer choices or candidates $\lbrace a_{1},   a_{N}\rbrace $  This section describes in detail the 5 different datasets we build, which are drawn from two sources of expert knowledge, namely WordNet BIBREF35 and the GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English (GCIDE)  We describe each resource in turn, and explain how the resulting dataset probes, which we call WordNetQA and DictionaryQA, are constructed 
For convenience, we will describe each source of expert knowledge as a directed, edge-labeled graph $G$  The nodes of this graph are $\mathcal {V} = \mathcal {C} \cup \mathcal {W} \cup \mathcal {S} \cup \mathcal {D}$, where $\mathcal {C}$ is a set of atomic concepts, $\mathcal {W}$ a set of words, $\mathcal {S}$ a set of sentences, and $\mathcal {D}$ a set of definitions (see Table TABREF4 for details for WordNet and GCIDE)  Each edge of $G$ is directed from an atomic concept in $\mathcal {C}$ to another node in $V$, and is labeled with a relation, such as hypernym or isa$^\uparrow $, from a set of relations $\mathcal {R}$ (see Table TABREF4) 
When defining our probe question templates, it will be useful to view $G$ as a set of (relation, source, target) triples $\mathcal {T} \subseteq \mathcal {R} \times \mathcal {C} \times \mathcal {V}$  Due to their origin in an expert knowledge source, such triples preserve semantic consistency  For instance, when the relation in a triple is def, the corresponding edge maps a concept in $\mathcal {C}$ to a definition in $\mathcal {D}$ 
To construct probe datasets, we rely on two heuristic functions, defined below for each individual probe: $\textsc {gen}_{\mathcal {Q}}(\tau )$, which generates gold question-answer pairs $(\textbf {q},\textbf {a})$ from a set of triples $\tau \subseteq \mathcal {T}$ and question templates $\mathcal {Q}$, and $\textsc {distr}(\tau ^{\prime })$, which generates distractor answers choices $\lbrace a^{\prime }_{1},   a^{\prime }_{N-1} \rbrace $ based on another set of triples $\tau ^{\prime }$ (where usually $\tau \subset \tau ^{\prime }$)  For brevity, we will use $\textsc {gen}(\tau )$ to denote $\textsc {gen}_{\mathcal {Q}}(\tau )$, leaving question templates $\mathcal {Q}$ implicit 
Dataset Probes and Construction ::: WordNetQA
WordNet is an English lexical database consisting of around 117k concepts, which are organized into groups of synsets that each contain a gloss (i e , a definition of the target concept), a set of representative English words (called lemmas), and, in around 33k synsets, example sentences  In addition, many synsets have ISA links to other synsets that express complex taxonomic relations  Figure FIGREF6 shows an example and Table TABREF4 summarizes how we formulate WordNet as a set of triples $\mathcal {T}$ of various types  These triples together represent a directed, edge-labeled graph $G$  Our main motivation for using WordNet, as opposed to a resource such as ConceptNet BIBREF36, is the availability of glosses ($\mathcal {D}$) and example sentences ($\mathcal {S}$), which allows us to construct natural language questions that contextualize the types of concepts we want to probe 
Dataset Probes and Construction ::: WordNetQA ::: Example Generation @!START@$\textsc {gen}(\tau )$@!END@ 
We build 4 individual datasets based on semantic relations native to WordNet (see BIBREF37): hypernymy (i e , generalization or ISA reasoning up a taxonomy, ISA$^\uparrow $), hyponymy (ISA$^{\downarrow }$), synonymy, and definitions  To generate a set of questions in each case, we employ a number of rule templates $\mathcal {Q}$ that operate over tuples  A subset of such templates is shown in Table TABREF8  The templates were designed to mimic naturalistic questions we observed in our science benchmarks 
For example, suppose we wish to create a question $\textbf {q}$ about the definition of a target concept $c \in \mathcal {C}$  We first select a question template from $\mathcal {Q}$ that first introduces the concept $c$ and its lemma $l \in \mathcal {W}$ in context using the example sentence $s \in \mathcal {S}$, and then asks to identify the corresponding WordNet gloss $d \in \mathcal {D}$, which serves as the gold answer $\textbf {a}$  The same is done for ISA reasoning; each question about a hypernym/hyponym relation between two concepts $c \rightarrow ^{\uparrow /\downarrow } c^{\prime } \in \mathcal {T}_{i}$ (e g , $\texttt {dog} \rightarrow ^{\uparrow /\downarrow } \texttt {animal/terrier}$) first introduces a context for $c$ and then asks for an answer that identifies $c^{\prime }$ (which is also provided with a gloss so as to contain all available context) 
In the latter case, the rules $(\texttt {isa}^{r},c,c^{\prime }) \in \mathcal {T}_i$ in Table TABREF8 cover only direct ISA links from $c$ in direction $r \in \lbrace \uparrow ,\downarrow \rbrace $  In practice, for each $c$ and direction $r$, we construct tests that cover the set HOPS$(c,r)$ of all direct as well as derived ISA relations of $c$:
This allows us to evaluate the extent to which models are able to handle complex forms of reasoning that require several inferential steps or hops 
Dataset Probes and Construction ::: WordNetQA ::: Distractor Generation: @!START@$\textsc {distr}(\tau ^{\prime })$@!END@ 
An example of how distractors are generated is shown in Figure FIGREF6, which relies on similar principles as above  For each concept $c$, we choose 4 distractor answers that are close in the WordNet semantic space  For example, when constructing hypernymy tests for $c$ from the set hops$(c,\uparrow )$, we build distractors by drawing from $\textsc {hops}(c,\downarrow )$ (and vice versa), as well as from the $\ell $-deep sister family of $c$, defined as follows  The 1-deep sister family is simply $c$'s siblings or sisters, i e , the other children $\tilde{c} \ne c$ of the parent node $c^{\prime }$ of $c$  For $\ell > 1$, the $\ell $-deep sister family also includes all descendants of each $\tilde{c}$ up to $\ell -1$ levels deep, denoted $\textsc {hops}_{\ell -1}(\tilde{c},\downarrow )$  Formally:
For definitions and synonyms we build distractors from all of these sets (with a similar restriction on the depth of sister distractors as noted above)  In doing this, we can systematically investigate model performance on a wide range of distractor sets 
Dataset Probes and Construction ::: WordNetQA ::: Perturbations and Semantic Clusters
Based on how we generate data, for each concept $c$ (i e , atomic WordNet synset) and probe type (i e , definitions, hypernymy, etc ), we have a wide variety of questions related to $c$ that manipulate 1) the complexity of reasoning that is involved (e g , the number of inferential hops) and; 2) the types of distractors (or distractor perturbations) that are employed  We call such sets semantic clusters  As we describe in the next section, semantic clusters allow us to devise new types of evaluation that reveal whether models have comprehensive and consistent knowledge of target concepts (e g , evaluating whether a model can correctly answer several questions associated with a concept, as opposed to a few disjoint instances) 
Details of the individual datasets are shown in Table TABREF12  From these sets, we follow BIBREF22 in allocating a maximum of 3k examples for training and reserve the rest for development and testing  Since we are interested in probing, having large held-out sets allows us to do detailed analysis and cluster-based evaluation 
Dataset Probes and Construction ::: DictionaryQA
The DictionaryQA dataset is created from the GCIDE dictionary, which is a comprehensive open-source English dictionary built largely from the Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary BIBREF38  Each entry consists of a word, its part-of-speech, its definition, and an optional example sentence (see Table TABREF14)  Overall, 33k entries (out of a total of 155k) contain example sentences/usages  As with the WordNet probes, we focus on this subset so as to contextualize each word being probed  In contrast to WordNet, GCIDE does not have ISA relations or explicit synsets, so we take each unique entry to be a distinct sense  We then use the dictionary entries to create a probe that centers around word-sense disambiguation, as described below 
Dataset Probes and Construction ::: DictionaryQA ::: Example and Distractor Generation 
To generate gold questions and answers, we use the same generation templates for definitions exemplified in Figure TABREF8 for WordNetQA  To generate distractors, we simply take alternative definitions for the target words that represent a different word sense (e g , the alternative definitions of gift shown in Table TABREF14), as well as randomly chosen definitions if needed to create a 5-way multiple choice question  As above, we reserve a maximum of 3k examples for training  Since we have only 9k examples in total in this dataset (see WordSense in Table TABREF12), we also reserve 3k each for development and testing 
We note that initial attempts to build this dataset through standard random splitting gave rise to certain systematic biases that were exploited by the choice-only baseline models described in the next section, and hence inflated overall model scores  After several efforts at filtering we found that, among other factors, using definitions from entries without example sentences as distractors (e g , the first two entries in Table TABREF14) had a surprising correlation with such biases  This suggests that possible biases involving differences between dictionary entries with and without examples can taint the resulting automatically generated MCQA dataset (for more discussion on the pitfalls involved with automatic dataset construction, see Section SECREF5) 
Probing Methodology and Modeling
Given the probes above, we now can start to answer the empirical questions posed at the beginning  Our main focus is on looking at transformer-based MCQA models trained in the science domain (using the benchmarks shown in Table TABREF21)  In this section, we provide details of MCQA and the target models, as well as several baselines that we use to sanity check our new datasets  To evaluate model competence, we look at a combination of model performance after science pre-training and after additional model fine-tuning using the lossless inoculation strategy of BIBREF22 (Section SECREF22)  In Section SECREF24, we also discuss a cluster-level accuracy metric for measuring performance over semantic clusters 
Probing Methodology and Modeling ::: Task Definition and Modeling
Given a dataset $D =\lbrace (\textbf {q}^{(d)}, \lbrace a_{1}^{(d)},   , a_{N}^{(d)}\rbrace ) \rbrace _{d}^{\mid D \mid }$ consisting of pairs of questions stems $\textbf {q}$ and answer choices $a_{i}$, the goal is to find the correct answer $a_{i^{*}}$ that correctly answers each $\textbf {q}$  Throughout this paper, we look at 5-way multiple-choice problems (i e , where each $N=5$) 
Probing Methodology and Modeling ::: Task Definition and Modeling ::: Question+Answer Encoder 
To model this, our investigation centers around the use of the transformer-based BIBREF25 BERT encoder and fine-tuning approach of BIBREF7 (see also BIBREF6)  For each question and individual answer pair $q^{(j)}_{a_{i}}$, we assume the following rendering of this input:
which is run through the pre-trained BERT encoder to generate a representation for $ q^{(j)}_{a_{i}}$ using the hidden state representation for CLS (i e , the classifier token) $\textbf {c}_{i}$:
The probability of a given answer $p^{(j)}_{i}$ is then computed as $p^{(j)}_{i} \propto e^{\textbf {v}\cdot \textbf {c}^{(j)}_{i}}$, which uses an additional set of classification parameters $\textbf {v} \in \mathbb {R}^{H}$ that are optimized (along with the full transformer network) by taking the final loss of the probability of each correct answer $p_{i^{*}}$ over all answer choices:
We specifically use BERT-large uncased with whole-word masking, as well as the RoBERTa-large model from BIBREF9, which is a more robustly trained version of the original BERT model  Our system uses the implementations provided in AllenNLP BIBREF39 and Huggingface BIBREF40 
Probing Methodology and Modeling ::: Task Definition and Modeling ::: Baselines and Sanity Checks 
When creating synthetic datasets, it is important to ensure that systematic biases, or annotation artifacts BIBREF41, are not introduced into the resulting probes and that the target datasets are sufficiently challenging (or good, in the sense of BIBREF42)  To test for this, we use several of the MCQA baseline models first introduced in BIBREF0, which take inspiration from the LSTM-based models used in BIBREF43 for NLI and various partial-input baselines based on these models 
Following the notation from BIBREF0, for any given sequence $s$ of tokens in $\lbrace q^{(j)}, a_{1}^{(j)},   ,a_{N}^{(j)}\rbrace $ in $D$, an encoding of $s$ is given as $h_{s}^{(j)} = \textbf {BiLSTM}(\textsc {embed}(s)) \in \mathbb {R}^{|s| \times 2h}$ (where $h$ is the dimension of the hidden state in each directional network, and embed$(\cdot )$ is an embedding function that assigns token-level embeddings to each token in $s$)  A contextual representation for each $s$ is then built by applying an element-wise max operation over $h_{s}$ as follows:
With these contextual representations, different baseline models can be constructed  For example, a Choice-Only model, which is a variant of the well-known hypothesis-only baseline used in NLI BIBREF46, scores each choice $c_{i}$ in the following way:
for $\textbf {W}^{T} \in \mathbb {R}^{2h}$ independently of the question and assigns a probability to each answer $p_{i}^{(j)} \propto e^{\alpha _{i}^{(j)}}$ 
A slight variant of this model, the Choice-to-choice model, tries to single out a given answer choice relative to other choices by scoring all choice pairs $\alpha _{i,i^{\prime }}^{(j)} = \textsc {Att}(r^{(j)}_{c_{i}},r^{(j)}_{c_{i^{\prime }}}) \in \mathbb {R}$ using a learned attention mechanism Att and finding the choice with the minimal similarity to other options (for full details, see their original paper)  In using these partial-input baselines, which we train directly on each target probe, we can check whether systematic biases related to answer choices were introduced into the data creation process 
A Question-to-choice model, in contrast, uses the contextual representations for each question and individual choice and an attention model Att model to get a score $\alpha ^{(j)}_{q,i} = \textsc {Att}(r^{(j)}_{q},r^{(j)}_{c_{i}}) \in \mathbb {R}$ as above  Here we also experiment with using ESIM BIBREF47 to generate the contextual representations $r$, as well as a simpler VecSimilarity model that measures the average vector similarity between question and answer tokens: $\alpha ^{(j)}_{q,i} = \textsc {Sim}(\textsc {embed}(q^{(j)}),\textsc {embed}(c^{(j)}_{i}))$  In contrast to the models above, these sets of baselines are used to check for artifacts between questions and answers that are not captured in the partial-input baselines (see discussion in BIBREF49) and ensure that the overall MCQA tasks are sufficiently difficult for our transformer models 
Probing Methodology and Modeling ::: Inoculation and Pre-training
Using the various models introduced above, we train these models on benchmark tasks in the science domain and look at model performance on our probes with and without additional training on samples of probe data, building on the idea of inoculation from BIBREF23  Model inoculation is the idea of continuing to train models on new challenge tasks (in our cases, separately for each probe) using only a small amount of examples  Unlike in ordinary fine-tuning, the goal is not to learn an entirely re-purposed model, but to improve on (or vaccinate against) particular phenomena (e g , our synthetic probes) that potentially deviate from a model's original training distribution (but that nonetheless might involve knowledge already contained in the model) 
In the variant proposed in BIBREF22, for each pre-trained (science) model and architecture $M_{a}$ we continue training the model on $k$ new probe examples (with a maximum of $k=$ 3k) under a set of different hyper-parameter configurations $j \in \lbrace 1,    , J\rbrace $ and identify, for each $k$, the model $M_{*}^{a,k}$ with the best aggregate performance $S$ on the original (orig) and new task:
As in BIBREF22, we found all models to be especially sensitive to different learning rates, and performed comprehensive hyper-parameters searches that also manipulate the number of iterations and random seeds used 
Using this methodology, we can see how much exposure to new data it takes for a given model to master a new task, and whether there are phenomena that stress particular models (e g , lead to catastrophic forgetting of the original task)  Given the restrictions on the number of fine-tuning examples, our assumption is that when models are able to maintain good performance on their original task during inoculation, the quickness with which they are able to learn the inoculated task provides evidence of prior competence, which is precisely what we aim to probe  To measure past performance, we define a model's inoculation cost as the difference in the performance of this model on its original task before and after inoculation 
We pre-train on an aggregated training set of the benchmark science exams detailed in Table TABREF21, and created an aggregate development set of around 4k science questions for evaluating overall science performance and inoculation costs  To handle the mismatch between number of answer choices in these sets, we made all sets 5-way by adding empty answers as needed  We also experimented with a slight variant of inoculation, called add-some inoculation, which involves balancing the inoculation training sets with naturalistic science questions  We reserve the MCQL dataset in Table TABREF21 for this purpose, and experiment with balancing each probe example with a science example (x1 matching) and adding twice as many science questions (x2 matching, up to 3k) for each new example 
Probing Methodology and Modeling ::: Evaluating Model Competence
The standard way to evaluate our MCQA models is by looking at the overall accuracy of the correct answer prediction, or what we call instance-level accuracy (as in Table TABREF25)  Given the nature of our data and the existence of semantic clusters as detailed in Section SECREF11 (i e , sets of questions and answers under different distractor choices and inference complexity), we also measure a model's cluster-level (or strict cluster) accuracy, which requires correctly answering all questions in a cluster  Example semantic clusters are shown in Table TABREF30; in the first case, there are 6 ISA$^\uparrow $ questions (including perturbations) about the concept trouser n 01 (e g , involving knowing that trousers are a type of consumer good and garment/clothing), which a model must answer in order to receive full credit 
Our cluster-based analysis is motivated by the idea that if a model truly knows the meaning of a given concept, such as the concept of trousers, then it should be able to answer arbitrary questions about this concept without sensitivity to varied distractors  While our strict cluster metric is simplistic, it takes inspiration from work on visual QA BIBREF53, and allows us to evaluate how consistent and robust models are across our different probes, and to get insight into whether errors are concentrated on a small set of concepts or widespread across clusters 
Results and Findings
In this section, we provide the results of the empirical questions first introduced in Figure FIGREF1, starting with the results of our baseline models 
Results and Findings ::: Are our Probes Sufficiently Challenging?
As shown in Table TABREF25, most of our partial-input baselines (i e , Choice-Only and Choice-to-Choice models) failed to perform well on our dataset probes across a wide range of models, showing that such probes are generally immune from biases relating to how distractors were generated  As already discussed in Section SECREF13, however, initial versions of the DictionaryQA dataset had unforeseen biases partly related to whether distractors were sampled from entries without example sentences, which resulted in high Choice-Only-GloVe scores ranging around 56% accuracy before a filtering step was applied to remove these distractors 
We had similar issues with the hypernymy probe which, even after a filtering step that used our Choice-to-Choice-GloVe model, still leads to high results on the BERT and RoBERTa choice-only models  Given that several attempts were made to entirely de-duplicate the different splits (both in terms of gold answers and distractor types), the source of these biases is not at all obvious, which shows how easy it is for unintended biases in expert knowledge to appear in the resulting datasets and the importance of having rigorous baselines  We also note the large gap in some cases between the BERT and RoBERTa versus GloVe choice-only models, which highlights the need for having partial-input baselines that use the best available models 
Using a more conventional set of Task-Specific QA models (i e , the LSTM-based Question-to-Choice models trained directly on the probes), we can see that results are not particularly strong on any of the datasets, suggesting that our probes are indeed sufficiently challenging and largely immune from overt artifacts  The poor performance of the VecSimilarity (which uses pre-trained Word2Vec embeddings without additional training) provides additional evidence that elementary lexical matching strategies are insufficient for solving any of the probing tasks 
Results and Findings ::: How well do pre-trained MCQA models do?
Science models that use non-transformer based encoders, such as the ESIM model with GloVe and ELMO, perform poorly across all probes, in many cases scoring near random chance, showing limits to how well they generalize from science to other tasks even with pre-trained GloVe and ELMO embeddings  In sharp contrast, the transformer models have mixed results, the most striking result being the RoBERTa models on the definitions and synonymy probes (achieving a test accuracy of 77% and 61%, respectively), which outperform several of the task-specific LSTM models trained directly on the probes  At first glance, this suggests that RoBERTa, which generally far outpaces even BERT across most probes, has high competence of definitions and synonyms even without explicit training on our new tasks 
Given the controlled nature of our probes, we can get a more detailed view of how well the science models are performing across different reasoning and distractor types, as shown in the first column of Figure FIGREF28 for ESIM and RoBERTa  The ESIM science model without training has uniformly poor performance across all categories, whereas the performance of RoBERTa is more varied  Across all datasets and number of hops (i e , the rows in the heat maps), model performance for RoBERTa is consistently highest among examples with random distractors (i e , the first column), and lowest in cases involving distractors that are closest in WordNet space (e g , sister and ISA, or up/down, distractors of distance $k^{\prime }=1$)  This is not surprising, given that, in the first case, random distractors are likely to be the easiest category (and the opposite for distractors close in space), but suggests that RoBERTa might only be getting the easiest cases correct 
Model performance also clearly degrades for hypernymy and hyponymy across all models as the number of hops $k$ increases (see red dashed boxes)  For example, problems that involve hyponym reasoning with sister distractors of distance $k^{\prime }=1$ (i e , the second column) degrades from 47% to 15% when the number of hops $k$ increases from 1 to 4  This general tendency persists even after additional fine-tuning, as we discuss next, and gives evidence that models are limited in their capacity for certain types of multi-hop inferences 
As discussed by BIBREF26, the choice of generation templates can have a significant effect on model performance  The results so far should therefore be regarded as a lower bound on model competence  It is possible that model performance is high for definitions, for example, because the associated templates best align with the science training distribution (which we know little about)  For this reason, the subsequent inoculation step is important—it gives the model an opportunity to learn about our target templates and couple this learned knowledge with its general knowledge acquired during pre-training and science training (which is, again, what we aim to probe) 
Results and Findings ::: Can Models Be Effectively Inoculated?
Model performance after additional fine-tuning, or inoculation, is shown in the last 3 rows of Table TABREF25, along with learning curves shown in Figure FIGREF29 for a selection of probes and models  In the former case, the performance represents the model (and inoculation amount) with the highest aggregate performance over the old task and new probe  Here we again see the transformer-based models outperform non-transformer models, and that better models correlate with lower inoculation costs  For example, when inoculating on synonymy, the cost for ESIM is around 7% reduced accuracy on its original task, as opposed to $< 1$% and around 1% for BERT and RoBERTa, respectively  This shows the high capacity for transformer models to absorb new tasks with minimal costs, as also observed in BIBREF22 for NLI 
As shown in Figure FIGREF29, transformer models tend to learn most tasks fairly quickly while keeping constant scores on their original tasks (i e , the flat dashed lines observed in plots 1-4), which gives evidence of high competence  In both cases, add-some inoculation proves to be a cheap and easy way to 1) improve scores on the probing tasks (i e , the solid black and blue lines in plot 1) and; 2) minimize loss on science (e g , the blue and black dashed lines in plots 2-4)  The opposite is the case for ESIM (plots 5-6); models are generally unable to simultaneously learn individual probes without degrading on their original task, and adding more science data during inoculation confuses models on both tasks 
As shown in Figure FIGREF28, RoBERTa is able to significantly improve performance across most categories even after inoculation with a mere 100 examples (the middle plot), which again provides strong evidence of prior competence  As an example, RoBERTa improves on 2-hop hyponymy inference with random distractors by 18% (from 59% to 77%)  After 3k examples, the model has high performance on virtually all categories (the same score increases from 59% to 87%), however results still tends to degrade as a function of hop and distractor complexity, as discussed above 
Despite the high performance of our transformer models after inoculation, model performance on most probes (with the exception of Definitions) averages around 80% for our best models  This suggests that there is still considerable room for improvement, especially for synonymy and word sense, which is a topic that we discuss more in Section SECREF6 
Results and Findings ::: Are Models Consistent across Clusters?
Table TABREF32 shows cluster-level accuracies for the different WordNetQA probes  As with performance across the different inference/distractor categories, these results are mixed  For some probes, such as definitions, our best models appear to be rather robust; e g , our RoBERTa model has a cluster accuracy of $75\%$, meaning that it can answer all questions perfectly for 75% of the target concepts and that errors are concentrated on a small minority (25%) of concepts  On synonymy and hypernymy, both BERT and RoBERTa appear robust on the majority of concepts, showing that errors are similarly concentrated  In contrast, our best model on hyponymy has an accuracy of 36%, meaning that its errors are spread across many concepts, thus suggesting less robustness 
Table TABREF30 shows a selection of semantic clusters involving ISA reasoning, as well as the model performance over different answers (shown symbolically) and perturbations  For example, in the the second case, the cluster is based around the concept/synset oppose v 06 and involves 4 inferences and a total 24 questions (i e , inferences with perturbations)  Our weakest model, ESIM, answers only 5 out of 24 questions correctly, whereas RoBERTa gets 21/24  In the other cases, RoBERTa gets all clusters correct, whereas BERT and ESIM get none of them correct 
We emphasize that these results only provide a crude look into model consistency and robustness  Recalling again the details in Table TABREF12, probes differ in terms of average size of clusters  Hyponymy, in virtue of having many more questions per cluster, might simply be a much more difficult dataset  In addition, such a strict evaluation does not take into account potential errors inside of clusters, which is an important issue that we discuss in the next section  We leave addressing such issues and coming up with more insightful cluster-based metrics for future work 
Discussion and Conclusion
We presented several new challenge datasets and a novel methodology for automatically building such datasets from knowledge graphs and taxonomies  We used these to probe state-of-the-art open-domain QA models (centering around models based on variants of BERT)  While our general methodology is amendable to any target knowledge resource or QA model/domain, we focus on probing definitions and ISA knowledge using open-source dictionaries and MCQA models trained in the science domain 
We find, consistent with recent probing studies BIBREF26, that transformer-based models have a remarkable ability to answer questions that involve complex forms of relational knowledge, both with and without explicit exposure to our new target tasks  In the latter case, a newer RoBERTa model trained only on benchmark science tasks is able to outperform several task-specific LSTM-based models trained directly on our probing data  When re-trained on small samples (e g , 100 examples) of probing data using variations of the lossless inoculation strategy from BIBREF22, RoBERTa is able to master many aspects of our probes with virtually no performance loss on its original QA task 
These positive results suggest that transformer-based models, especially models additionally fine-tuned on small samples of synthetic data, can be used in place of task-specific models used for querying relational knowledge, as has already been done for targeted tasks such as word sense disambiguation BIBREF54  Since models seem to already contain considerable amounts of relational knowledge, our simple inoculation strategy, which tries to nudge models to bring out this knowledge explicitly, could serve as a cheaper alternative to recent attempts to build architectures that explicitly incorporate structured knowledge BIBREF55; we see many areas where our inoculation strategy could be improved for such purposes, including having more complex loss functions that manage old and new information, as well as using techniques that take into account network plasticity BIBREF56 
The main appeal of using automatically generate datasets is the ability to systematically manipulate and control the complexity of target questions, which allows for more controlled experimentation and new forms of evaluation  Despite the positive results described above, results that look directly at the effect of different types of distractors and the complexity of reasoning show that our best models, even after additional fine-tuning, struggle with certain categories of hard distractors and multi-hop inferences  For some probes, our cluster-based analysis also reveals that errors are widespread across concept clusters, suggesting that models are not always consistent and robust  These results, taken together with our findings about the vulnerability of synthetic datasets to systematic biases, suggest that there is much room for improvement and that the positive results should be taken with a grain of salt  Developing better ways to evaluate semantic clusters and model robustness would be a step in this direction 
We emphasize that using synthetic versus naturalistic QA data comes with important trade-offs  While we are able to generate large amounts of systematically controlled data at virtually no cost or need for manual annotation, it is much harder to validate the quality of such data at such a scale and such varying levels of complexity  Conversely, with benchmark QA datasets, it is much harder to perform the type of careful manipulations and cluster-based analyses we report here  While we assume that the expert knowledge we employ, in virtue of being hand-curated by human experts, is generally correct, we know that such resources are fallible and error-prone  Initial crowd-sourcing experiments that look at validating samples of our data show high agreement across probes and that human scores correlate with the model trends across the probe categories  More details of these studies are left for future work 
Context 2: Introduction
Language modelling in its inception had one-hot vector encoding of words  However, it captures only alphabetic ordering but not the word semantic similarity  Vector space models helps to learn word representations in a lower dimensional space and also captures semantic similarity  Learning word embedding aids in natural language processing tasks such as question answering and reasoning BIBREF0, stance detection BIBREF1, claim verification BIBREF2 
Recent models BIBREF3, BIBREF4 work on the basis that words with similar context share semantic similarity  BIBREF4 proposes a neural probabilistic model which models the target word probability conditioned on the previous words using a recurrent neural network  Word2Vec models BIBREF3 such as continuous bag-of-words (CBOW) predict the target word given the context, and skip-gram model works in reverse of predicting the context given the target word  While, GloVe embeddings were based on a Global matrix factorization on local contexts BIBREF5  However, the aforementioned models do not handle words with multiple meanings (polysemies) 
BIBREF6 proposes a neural network approach considering both local and global contexts in learning word embeddings (point estimates)  Their multiple prototype model handles polysemous words by providing apriori heuristics about word senses in the dataset  BIBREF7 proposes an alternative to handle polysemous words by a modified skip-gram model and EM algorithm  BIBREF8 presents a non-parametric based alternative to handle polysemies  However, these approaches fail to consider entailment relations among the words  BIBREF9 learn a Gaussian distribution per word using the expected likelihood kernel  However, for polysemous words, this may lead to word distributions with larger variances as it may have to cover various senses 
BIBREF10 proposes multimodal word distribution approach  It captures polysemy  However, the energy based objective function fails to consider asymmetry and hence entailment  Textual entailment recognition is necessary to capture lexical inference relations such as causality (for example, mosquito $\rightarrow $ malaria), hypernymy (for example, dog $\models $ animal) etc 
In this paper, we propose to obtain multi-sense word embedding distributions by using a variant of max margin objective based on the asymmetric KL divergence energy function to capture textual entailment  Multi-sense distributions are advantageous in capturing polysemous nature of words and in reducing the uncertainty per word by distributing it across senses  However, computing KL divergence between mixtures of Gaussians is intractable, and we use a KL divergence approximation based on stricter upper and lower bounds  While capturing textual entailment (asymmetry), we have also not compromised on capturing symmetrical similarity between words (for example, funny and hilarious) which will be elucidated in Section $3 1$  We also show the effectiveness of the proposed approach on the benchmark word similarity and entailment datasets in the experimental section 
Methodology ::: Word Representation
Probabilistic representation of words helps one model uncertainty in word representation, and polysemy  Given a corpus $V$, containing a list of words each represented as $w$, the probability density for a word $w$ can be represented as a mixture of Gaussians with $C$ components BIBREF10 
Here, $p_{w,j}$ represents the probability of word $w$ belonging to the component $j$, $\operatorname{\mathbf {\mu }}_{w,j}$ represents $D$ dimensional word representation corresponding to the $j^{th}$ component sense of the word $w$, and $\Sigma _{w,j}$ represents the uncertainty in representation for word $w$ belonging to component $j$ 
Objective function
The model parameters (means, covariances and mixture weights) $\theta $ can be learnt using a variant of max-margin objective BIBREF11 
Here $E_\theta (\cdot , \cdot )$ represents an energy function which assigns a score to the pair of words, $w$ is a particular word under consideration, $c$ its positive context (same context), and $c^{\prime }$ the negative context  The objective aims to push the margin of the difference between the energy function of a word $w$ to its positive context $c$ higher than its negative context $c$ by a threshold of $m$  Thus, word pairs in the same context gets a higher energy than the word pairs in the dissimilar context  BIBREF10 consider the energy function to be an expected likelihood kernel which is defined as follows 
This is similar to the cosine similarity metric over vectors and the energy between two words is maximum when they have similar distributions  But, the expected likelihood kernel is a symmetric metric which will not be suitable for capturing ordering among words and hence entailment 
Objective function ::: Proposed Energy function
As each word is represented by a mixture of Gaussian distributions, KL divergence is a better choice of energy function to capture distance between distributions  Since, KL divergence is minimum when the distributions are similar and maximum when they are dissimilar, energy function is taken as exponentiated negative KL divergence 
However, computing KL divergence between Gaussian mixtures is intractable and obtaining exact KL value is not possible  One way of approximating the KL is by Monte-Carlo approximation but it requires large number of samples to get a good approximation and is computationally expensive on high dimensional embedding space 
Alternatively, BIBREF12 presents a KL approximation between Gaussian mixtures where they obtain an upper bound through product of Gaussian approximation method and a lower bound through variational approximation method  In BIBREF13, the authors combine the lower and upper bounds from approximation methods of BIBREF12 to provide a stricter bound on KL between Gaussian mixtures  Lets consider Gaussian mixtures for the words $w$ and $v$ as follows 
The approximate KL divergence between the Gaussian mixture representations over the words $w$ and $v$ is shown in equation DISPLAY_FORM8  More details on approximation is included in the Supplementary Material 
where $EL_{ik}(w,w) = \int f_{w,i} (\operatorname{\mathbf {x}}) f_{w,k} (\operatorname{\mathbf {x}}) d\operatorname{\mathbf {x}}$ and $EL_{ij}(w,v) = \int f_{w,i} (\operatorname{\mathbf {x}}) f_{v,k} (\operatorname{\mathbf {x}}) d\operatorname{\mathbf {x}}$  Note that the expected likelihood kernel appears component wise inside the approximate KL divergence derivation 
One advantage of using KL as energy function is that it enables to capture asymmetry in entailment datasets  For eg , let us consider the words 'chair' with two senses as 'bench' and 'sling', and 'wood' with two senses as 'trees' and 'furniture'  The word chair ($w$) is entailed within wood ($v$), i e
Context 3: Introduction
Propaganda aims at influencing people's mindset with the purpose of advancing a specific agenda  In the Internet era, thanks to the mechanism of sharing in social networks, propaganda campaigns have the potential of reaching very large audiences BIBREF0, BIBREF1, BIBREF2 
Propagandist news articles use specific techniques to convey their message, such as whataboutism, red Herring, and name calling, among many others (cf  Section SECREF3)  Whereas proving intent is not easy, we can analyse the language of a claim/article and look for the use of specific propaganda techniques  Going at this fine-grained level can yield more reliable systems and it also makes it possible to explain to the user why an article was judged as propagandist by an automatic system 
With this in mind, we organised the shared task on fine-grained propaganda detection at the NLP4IF@EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 workshop  The task is based on a corpus of news articles annotated with an inventory of 18 propagandist techniques at the fragment level  We hope that the corpus would raise interest outside of the community of researchers studying propaganda  For example, the techniques related to fallacies and the ones relying on emotions might provide a novel setting for researchers interested in Argumentation and Sentiment Analysis 
Related Work
Propaganda has been tackled mostly at the article level  BIBREF3 created a corpus of news articles labelled as propaganda, trusted, hoax, or satire  BIBREF4 experimented with a binarized version of that corpus: propaganda vs  the other three categories  BIBREF5 annotated a large binary corpus of propagandist vs  non-propagandist articles and proposed a feature-based system for discriminating between them  In all these cases, the labels were obtained using distant supervision, assuming that all articles from a given news outlet share the label of that outlet, which inevitably introduces noise BIBREF6 
A related field is that of computational argumentation which, among others, deals with some logical fallacies related to propaganda  BIBREF7 presented a corpus of Web forum discussions with instances of ad hominem fallacy  BIBREF8, BIBREF9 introduced Argotario, a game to educate people to recognize and create fallacies, a by-product of which is a corpus with $1 3k$ arguments annotated with five fallacies such as ad hominem, red herring and irrelevant authority, which directly relate to propaganda 
Unlike BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF7, our corpus uses 18 techniques annotated on the same set of news articles  Moreover, our annotations aim at identifying the minimal fragments related to a technique instead of flagging entire arguments 
The most relevant related work is our own, which is published in parallel to this paper at EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 BIBREF10 and describes a corpus that is a subset of the one used for this shared task 
Propaganda Techniques
Propaganda uses psychological and rhetorical techniques to achieve its objective  Such techniques include the use of logical fallacies and appeal to emotions  For the shared task, we use 18 techniques that can be found in news articles and can be judged intrinsically, without the need to retrieve supporting information from external resources  We refer the reader to BIBREF10 for more details on the propaganda techniques; below we report the list of techniques:
Propaganda Techniques ::: 1  Loaded language 
Using words/phrases with strong emotional implications (positive or negative) to influence an audience BIBREF11 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 2  Name calling or labeling 
Labeling the object of the propaganda as something the target audience fears, hates, finds undesirable or otherwise loves or praises BIBREF12 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 3  Repetition 
Repeating the same message over and over again, so that the audience will eventually accept it BIBREF13, BIBREF12 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 4  Exaggeration or minimization 
Either representing something in an excessive manner: making things larger, better, worse, or making something seem less important or smaller than it actually is BIBREF14, e g , saying that an insult was just a joke 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 5  Doubt 
Questioning the credibility of someone or something 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 6  Appeal to fear/prejudice 
Seeking to build support for an idea by instilling anxiety and/or panic in the population towards an alternative, possibly based on preconceived judgments 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 7  Flag-waving 
Playing on strong national feeling (or with respect to a group, e g , race, gender, political preference) to justify or promote an action or idea BIBREF15 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 8  Causal oversimplification 
Assuming one cause when there are multiple causes behind an issue  We include scapegoating as well: the transfer of the blame to one person or group of people without investigating the complexities of an issue 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 9  Slogans 
A brief and striking phrase that may include labeling and stereotyping  Slogans tend to act as emotional appeals BIBREF16 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 10  Appeal to authority 
Stating that a claim is true simply because a valid authority/expert on the issue supports it, without any other supporting evidence BIBREF17  We include the special case where the reference is not an authority/expert, although it is referred to as testimonial in the literature BIBREF14 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 11  Black-and-white fallacy, dictatorship 
Presenting two alternative options as the only possibilities, when in fact more possibilities exist BIBREF13  As an extreme case, telling the audience exactly what actions to take, eliminating any other possible choice (dictatorship) 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 12  Thought-terminating cliché 
Words or phrases that discourage critical thought and meaningful discussion about a given topic  They are typically short and generic sentences that offer seemingly simple answers to complex questions or that distract attention away from other lines of thought BIBREF18 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 13  Whataboutism 
Discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly disproving their argument BIBREF19 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 14  Reductio ad Hitlerum 
Persuading an audience to disapprove an action or idea by suggesting that the idea is popular with groups hated in contempt by the target audience  It can refer to any person or concept with a negative connotation BIBREF20 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 15  Red herring 
Introducing irrelevant material to the issue being discussed, so that everyone's attention is diverted away from the points made BIBREF11  Those subjected to a red herring argument are led away from the issue that had been the focus of the discussion and urged to follow an observation or claim that may be associated with the original claim, but is not highly relevant to the issue in dispute BIBREF20 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 16  Bandwagon 
Attempting to persuade the target audience to join in and take the course of action because “everyone else is taking the same action” BIBREF15 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 17  Obfuscation, intentional vagueness, confusion 
Using deliberately unclear words, to let the audience have its own interpretation BIBREF21, BIBREF11  For instance, when an unclear phrase with multiple possible meanings is used within the argument and, therefore, it does not really support the conclusion 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 18  Straw man 
When an opponent's proposition is substituted with a similar one which is then refuted in place of the original BIBREF22 
Tasks
The shared task features two subtasks:
Tasks ::: Fragment-Level Classification task (FLC) 
Given a news article, detect all spans of the text in which a propaganda technique is used  In addition, for each span the propaganda technique applied must be identified 
Tasks ::: Sentence-Level Classification task (SLC) 
A sentence is considered propagandist if it contains at least one propagandist fragment  We then define a binary classification task in which, given a sentence, the correct label, either propaganda or non-propaganda, is to be predicted 
Data
The input for both tasks consists of news articles in free-text format, collected from 36 propagandist and 12 non-propagandist news outlets and then annotated by professional annotators  More details about the data collection and the annotation, as well as statistics about the corpus can be found in BIBREF10, where an earlier version of the corpus is described, which includes 450 news articles  We further annotated 47 additional articles for the purpose of the shared task using the same protocol and the same annotators 
The training, the development, and the test partitions of the corpus used for the shared task consist of 350, 61, and 86 articles and of 16,965, 2,235, and 3,526 sentences, respectively  Figure FIGREF15 shows an annotated example, which contains several propaganda techniques  For example, the fragment babies on line 1 is an instance of both Name_Calling and Labeling  Note that the fragment not looking as though Trump killed his grandma on line 4 is an instance of Exaggeration_or_Minimisation and it overlaps with the fragment killed his grandma, which is an instance of Loaded_Language 
Table TABREF23 reports the total number of instances per technique and the percentage with respect to the total number of annotations, for the training and for the development sets 
Setup
The shared task had two phases: In the development phase, the participants were provided labeled training and development datasets; in the testing phase, testing input was further provided 
The participants tried to achieve the best performance on the development set  A live leaderboard kept track of the submissions 
The test set was released and the participants had few days to make final predictions 
In phase 2, no immediate feedback on the submissions was provided  The winner was determined based on the performance on the test set 
Evaluation ::: FLC task 
FLC is a composition of two subtasks: the identification of the propagandist text fragments and the identification of the techniques used (18-way classification task)  While F$_1$ measure is appropriate for a multi-class classification task, we modified it to account for partial matching between the spans; see BIBREF10 for more details  We further computed an F$_1$ value for each propaganda technique (not shown below for the sake of saving space, but available on the leaderboard) 
Evaluation ::: SLC task 
SLC is a binary classification task with imbalanced data  Therefore, the official evaluation measure for the task is the standard F$_1$ measure  We further report Precision and Recall 
Baselines
The baseline system for the SLC task is a very simple logistic regression classifier with default parameters, where we represent the input instances with a single feature: the length of the sentence  The performance of this baseline on the SLC task is shown in Tables TABREF33 and TABREF34 
The baseline for the FLC task generates spans and selects one of the 18 techniques randomly  The inefficacy of such a simple random baseline is illustrated in Tables TABREF36 and TABREF41 
Participants and Approaches
A total of 90 teams registered for the shared task, and 39 of them submitted predictions for a total of 3,065 submissions  For the FLC task, 21 teams made a total of 527 submissions, and for the SLC task, 35 teams made a total of 2,538 submissions 
Below, we give an overview of the approaches as described in the participants' papers  Tables TABREF28 and TABREF29 offer a high-level summary 
Participants and Approaches ::: Teams Participating in the Fragment-Level Classification Only
Team newspeak BIBREF23 achieved the best results on the test set for the FLC task using 20-way word-level classification based on BERT BIBREF24: a word could belong to one of the 18 propaganda techniques, to none of them, or to an auxiliary (token-derived) class  The team fed one sentence at a time in order to reduce the workload  In addition to experimenting with an out-of-the-box BERT, they also tried unsupervised fine-tuning both on the 1M news dataset and on Wikipedia  Their best model was based on the uncased base model of BERT, with 12 Transformer layers BIBREF25, and 110 million parameters  Moreover, oversampling of the least represented classes proved to be crucial for the final performance  Finally, careful analysis has shown that the model pays special attention to adjectives and adverbs 
Team Stalin BIBREF26 focused on data augmentation to address the relatively small size of the data for fine-tuning contextual embedding representations based on ELMo BIBREF27, BERT, and Grover BIBREF28  The balancing of the embedding space was carried out by means of synthetic minority class over-sampling  Then, the learned representations were fed into an LSTM 
Participants and Approaches ::: Teams Participating in the Sentence-Level Classification Only
Team CAUnLP BIBREF29 used two context-aware representations based on BERT  In the first representation, the target sentence is followed by the title of the article  In the second representation, the previous sentence is also added  They performed subsampling in order to deal with class imbalance, and experimented with BERT$_{BASE}$ and BERT$_{LARGE}$
Team LIACC BIBREF30 used hand-crafted features and pre-trained ELMo embeddings  They also observed a boost in performance when balancing the dataset by dropping some negative examples 
Team JUSTDeep BIBREF31 used a combination of models and features, including word embeddings based on GloVe BIBREF32 concatenated with vectors representing affection and lexical features  These were combined in an ensemble of supervised models: bi-LSTM, XGBoost, and variations of BERT 
Team YMJA BIBREF33 also based their approach on fine-tuned BERT  Inspired by kaggle competitions on sentiment analysis, they created an ensemble of models via cross-validation 
Team jinfen BIBREF34 used a logistic regression model fed with a manifold of representations, including TF IDF and BERT vectors, as well as vocabularies and readability measures 
Team Tha3aroon BIBREF35 implemented an ensemble of three classifiers: two based on BERT and one based on a universal sentence encoder BIBREF36 
Team NSIT BIBREF37 explored three of the most popular transfer learning models: various versions of ELMo, BERT, and RoBERTa BIBREF38 
Team Mindcoders BIBREF39 combined BERT, Bi-LSTM and Capsule networks BIBREF40 into a single deep neural network and pre-trained the resulting network on corpora used for related tasks, e g , emotion classification 
Finally, team ltuorp BIBREF41 used an attention transformer using BERT trained on Wikipedia and BookCorpus 
Participants and Approaches ::: Teams Participating in Both Tasks
Team MIC-CIS BIBREF42 participated in both tasks  For the sentence-level classification, they used a voting ensemble including logistic regression, convolutional neural networks, and BERT, in all cases using FastText embeddings BIBREF43 and pre-trained BERT models  Beside these representations, multiple features of readability, sentiment and emotions were considered  For the fragment-level task, they used a multi-task neural sequence tagger, based on LSTM-CRF BIBREF44, in conjunction with linguistic features  Finally, they applied sentence- and fragment-level models jointly 
Team CUNLP BIBREF45 considered two approaches for the sentence-level task  The first approach was based on fine-tuning BERT  The second approach complemented the fine-tuned BERT approach by feeding its decision into a logistic regressor, together with features from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lexicon and punctuation-derived features  Similarly to BIBREF42, for the fragment-level problem they used a Bi-LSTM-CRF architecture, combining both character- and word-level embeddings 
Team ProperGander BIBREF46 also used BERT, but they paid special attention to the imbalance of the data, as well as to the differences between training and testing  They showed that augmenting the training data by oversampling yielded improvements when testing on data that is temporally far from the training (by increasing recall)  In order to deal with the imbalance, they performed cost-sensitive classification, i e , the errors on the smaller positive class were more costly  For the fragment-level classification, inspired by named entity recognition, they used a model based on BERT using Continuous Random Field stacked on top of an LSTM 
Evaluation Results
The results on the test set for the SLC task are shown in Table TABREF33, while Table TABREF34 presents the results on the development set at the end of phase 1 (cf  Section SECREF6)  The general decrease of the F$_1$ values between the development and the test set could indicate that systems tend to overfit on the development set  Indeed, the winning team ltuorp chose the parameters of their system both on the development set and on a subset of the training set in order to improve the robustness of their system 
Tables TABREF36 and TABREF41 report the results on the test and on the development sets for the FLC task  For this task, the results tend to be more stable across the two sets  Indeed, team newspeak managed to almost keep the same difference in performance with respect to team Antiganda  Note that team MIC-CIS managed to reach the third position despite never having submitted a run on the development set 
Conclusion and Further Work
We have described the NLP4IF@EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 shared task on fine-grained propaganda identification  We received 25 and 12 submissions on the test set for the sentence-level classification and the fragment-level classification tasks, respectively  Overall, the sentence-level task was easier and most submitted systems managed to outperform the baseline  The fragment-level task proved to be much more challenging, with lower absolute scores, but most teams still managed to outperform the baseline 
We plan to make the schema and the dataset publicly available to be used beyond NLP4IF  We hope that the corpus would raise interest outside of the community of researchers studying propaganda: the techniques related to fallacies and the ones relying on emotions might provide a novel setting for researchers interested in Argumentation and Sentiment Analysis 
As a kind of advertisement, Task 11 at SemEval 2020 is a follow up of this shared task  It features two complimentary tasks:
Given a free-text article, identify the propagandist text spans 
Given a text span already flagged as propagandist and its context, identify the specific propaganda technique it contains 
This setting would allow participants to focus their efforts on binary sequence labeling for Task 1 and on multi-class classification for Task 2 
Acknowledgments
This research is part of the Propaganda Analysis Project, which is framed within the Tanbih project  The Tanbih project aims to limit the effect of “fake news”, propaganda, and media bias by making users aware of what they are reading, thus promoting media literacy and critical thinking, which is arguably the best way to address disinformation and “fake news ” The project is developed in collaboration between the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), HBKU and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) 
The corpus for the task was annotated by A Data Pro, a company that performs high-quality manual annotations 

ground_truth: Unanswerable

Yes

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. How does this approach compare to other WSD approaches employing word embeddings?
Context 2:  chair $\models $ wood  Now, minimizing the KL divergence necessitates maximizing $\log {\sum _j p_{v,j} \exp ({-KL(f_{w,i} (\operatorname{\mathbf {x}})||f_{v,j}(\operatorname{\mathbf {x}}))})}$ which in turn minimizes $KL(f_{w,i}(\operatorname{\mathbf {x}})||f_{v,j}(\operatorname{\mathbf {x}}))$  This will result in the support of the $i^{th}$ component of $w$ to be within the $j^{th}$ component of $v$, and holds for all component pairs leading to the entailment of $w$ within $v$  Consequently, we can see that bench $\models $ trees, bench $\models $ furniture, sling $\models $ trees, and sling $\models $ furniture  Thus, it introduces lexical relationship between the senses of child word and that of the parent word  Minimizing the KL also necessitates maximizing $\log {\sum _j {p_{v,j}} EL_{ij}(w,v)}$ term for all component pairs among $w$ and $v$  This is similar to maximizing expected likelihood kernel, which brings the means of $f_{w,i}(\operatorname{\mathbf {x}})$ and $f_{v,j}(\operatorname{\mathbf {x}})$ closer (weighted by their co-variances) as discussed in BIBREF10  Hence, the proposed approach captures the best of both worlds, thereby catering to both word similarity and entailment 
We also note that minimizing the KL divergence necessitates minimizing $\log {\sum _k p_{w,k} \exp ({-KL(f_{w,i}||f_{w,k})})}$ which in turn maximizes $KL(f_{w,i}||f_{w,k})$  This prevents the different mixture components of a word converging to single Gaussian and encourages capturing different possible senses of the word  The same is also achieved by minimizing $\sum _k {p_{w,k}} EL_{ik}(w,w)$ term and act as a regularization term which promotes diversity in learning senses of a word 
Experimentation and Results
We train our proposed model GM$\_$KL (Gaussian Mixture using KL Divergence) on the Text8 dataset BIBREF14 which is a pre-processed data of $17M$ words from wikipedia  Of which, 71290 unique and frequent words are chosen using the subsampling trick in BIBREF15  We compare GM$\_$KL with the previous approaches w2g BIBREF9 ( single Gaussian model) and w2gm BIBREF10 (mixture of Gaussian model with expected likelihood kernel)  For all the models used for experimentation, the embedding size ($D$) was set to 50, number of mixtures to 2, context window length to 10, batch size to 128  The word embeddings were initialized using a uniform distribution in the range of $[-\sqrt{\frac{3}{D}}$, $\sqrt{\frac{3}{D}}]$ such that the expectation of variance is 1 and mean 0 BIBREF16  One could also consider initializing the word embeddings using other contextual representations such as BERT BIBREF17 and ELMo BIBREF18 in the proposed approach  In order to purely analyze the performance of $\emph {GM\_KL}$ over the other models, we have chosen initialization using uniform distribution for experiments  For computational benefits, diagonal covariance is used similar to BIBREF10  Each mixture probability is constrained in the range $[0,1]$, summing to 1 by optimizing over unconstrained scores in the range $(-\infty ,\infty )$ and converting scores to probability using softmax function  The mixture scores are initialized to 0 to ensure fairness among all the components  The threshold for negative sampling was set to $10^{-5}$, as recommended in BIBREF3  Mini-batch gradient descent with Adagrad optimizer BIBREF19 was used with initial learning rate set to $0 05$ 
Table TABREF9 shows the qualitative results of GM$\_$KL  Given a query word and component id, the set of nearest neighbours along with their respective component ids are listed  For eg , the word `plane' in its 0th component captures the `geometry' sense and so are its neighbours, and its 1st component captures `vehicle' sense and so are its corresponding neighbours  Other words such as `rock' captures both the `metal' and `music' senses, `star' captures `celebrity' and `astronomical' senses, and `phone' captures `telephony' and `internet' senses 
We quantitatively compare the performance of the GM$\_$KL, w2g, and w2gm approaches on the SCWS dataset BIBREF6  The dataset consists of 2003 word pairs of polysemous and homonymous words with labels obtained by an average of 10 human scores  The Spearman correlation between the human scores and the model scores are computed  To obtain the model score, the following metrics are used:
MaxCos: Maximum cosine similarity among all component pairs of words $w$ and $v$:
AvgCos: Average component-wise cosine similarity between the words $w$ and $v$ 
KL$\_$approx: Formulated as shown in (DISPLAY_FORM8) between the words $w$ and $v$ 
KL$\_$comp: Maximum component-wise negative KL between words $w$ and $v$:
Table TABREF17 compares the performance of the approaches on the SCWS dataset  It is evident from Table TABREF17 that GM$\_$KL achieves better correlation than existing approaches for various metrics on SCWS dataset 
Table TABREF18 shows the Spearman correlation values of GM$\_$KL model evaluated on the benchmark word similarity datasets: SL BIBREF20, WS, WS-R, WS-S BIBREF21, MEN BIBREF22, MC BIBREF23, RG BIBREF24, YP BIBREF25, MTurk-287 and MTurk-771 BIBREF26, BIBREF27, and RW BIBREF28  The metric used for comparison is 'AvgCos'  It can be seen that for most of the datasets, GM$\_$KL achieves significantly better correlation score than w2g and w2gm approaches  Other datasets such as MC and RW consist of only a single sense, and hence w2g model performs better and GM$\_$KL achieves next better performance  The YP dataset have multiple senses but does not contain entailed data and hence could not make use of entailment benefits of GM$\_$KL 
Table TABREF19 shows the evaluation results of GM$\_$KL model on the entailment datasets such as entailment pairs dataset BIBREF29 created from WordNet with both positive and negative labels, a crowdsourced dataset BIBREF30 of 79 semantic relations labelled as entailed or not and annotated distributionally similar nouns dataset BIBREF31  The 'MaxCos' similarity metric is used for evaluation and the best precision and best F1-score is shown, by picking the optimal threshold  Overall, GM$\_$KL performs better than both w2g and w2gm approaches 
Conclusion
We proposed a KL divergence based energy function for learning multi-sense word embedding distributions modelled as Gaussian mixtures  Due to the intractability of the Gaussian mixtures for the KL divergence measure, we use an approximate KL divergence function  We also demonstrated that the proposed GM$\_$KL approaches performed better than other approaches on the benchmark word similarity and entailment datasets 
tocsectionAppendices
Approximation for KL divergence between mixtures of gaussians
KL between gaussian mixtures $f_{w}(\operatorname{\mathbf {x}})$ and $f_{v}(\operatorname{\mathbf {x}})$ can be decomposed as:
BIBREF12 presents KL approximation between gaussian mixtures using
product of gaussian approximation method where KL is approximated using product of component gaussians and
variational approximation method where KL is approximated by introducing some variational parameters 
The product of component gaussian approximation method using Jensen's inequality provides upper bounds as shown in equations DISPLAY_FORM23 and  
The variational approximation method provides lower bounds as shown in equations DISPLAY_FORM24 and DISPLAY_FORM25 
where $H$ represents the entropy term and the entropy of $i^{th}$ component of word $w$ with dimension $D$ is given as
In BIBREF13, the authors combine the lower and upper bounds from approximation methods of BIBREF12 to formulate a stricter bound on KL between gaussian mixtures 
From equations DISPLAY_FORM23 and DISPLAY_FORM25, a stricter lower bound for KL between gaussian mixtures is obtained as shown in equation DISPLAY_FORM26
From equations and DISPLAY_FORM24, a stricter upper bound for KL between gaussian mixtures is obtained as shown in equation DISPLAY_FORM27
Finally, the KL between gaussian mixtures is taken as the mean of KL upper and lower bounds as shown in equation DISPLAY_FORM28 

ground_truth: GM$\_$KL achieves better correlation than existing approaches for various metrics on SCWS dataset.

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. What was the baseline for this task?
Context 4:  The two word representations INLINEFORM3 and INLINEFORM4 are projected to a space where their element wise difference can be used to model their dissimilarity and softmax applied on them can produce high probability to more dissimilar word pairs 
It is good to note that conflict suffers from the same limitation that attention suffers from  This is when a pair of sentences are highly matching especially with multiple associations  But when the two methods work together, each compensates for the other's shortcomings 
Combination of attention and conflict
We used two weighted representations of INLINEFORM0 using weights of attention and conflict as computed in Eqn  (4) and (8) respectively  Our final representation of a word representation INLINEFORM1 conditioned on INLINEFORM2 can be expressed as: DISPLAYFORM0
where A and C denote that they are from attention and conflict models respectively 
Relation to Multi-Head attention
Multi-head attention, as introduced in BIBREF3 , computes multiple identical attention mechanism parallelly on multiple linear projections of same inputs  The parameters of each attention and projections are different in each head  Finally, they concatenate all the attentions which is similar to how we concatenate conflict and attention  However, they use dot-product to compute each of the attention 
Our combined model that contains both attention and conflict can be thought of as a 2-head attention model but both heads are different  Our conflict head explicitly captures difference between the inputs 
Visualizing attention and conflict
We observe how our conflict model learns the dissimilarities between word representations  We achieve that by visualizing the heatmap of the weight matrix INLINEFORM0 for both attention and conflict from eqns  (3) and (8)  While attention successfully learns the alignments, conflict matrix also shows that our approach models the contradicting associations like "animal" and "lake" or "australia" and "world"  These two associations are the unique pairs which are instrumental in determining that the two queries are not similar 
The model
We create two models both of which constitutes of three main parts: encoder, interaction and classifier and take two sequences as input  Except interaction, all the other parts are exactly identical between the two models  The encoder is shared among the sequences simply uses two stacked GRU layers  The interaction part consists of only attention for one model while for the another one it consists of attention and conflict combined as shown in (eqn 11)   The classifier part is simply stacked fully-connected layers  Figure 3 shows a block diagram of how our model looks like 
Task 1: Quora Duplicate Question Pair Detection
The dataset includes pairs of questions labelled as 1 or 0 depending on whether a pair is duplicate or not respectively  This is a popular pair-level classification task on which extensive work has already been done before like BIBREF7 , BIBREF8   For this task, we make the output layer of our model to predict two probabilities for non-duplicate and duplicate  We sample the data from the original dataset so that it contains equal positive and negative classes  Original dataset has some class imbalance but for sake simplicity we don't consider it  The final data that we use has roughly 400,000 question pairs and we split this data into train and test using 8:2 ratio 
We train all our models for roughly 2 epochs with a batch size of 64  We use a hidden dimension of 150 throughout the model  The embedding layer uses ELMO BIBREF9 which has proven to be very useful in various downstream language understanding tasks  Our FC layers consists of four dense layers with INLINEFORM0 activation after each layer  The dropout rate is kept as 0 2 for every recurrent and FC linear layers  We use Adam optimizer in our experiment with epsilon=1e-8, beta=0 9 and learning rate=1e-3 
Task 2: Ranking questions in Bing's People Also Ask
People Also Ask is a feature in Bing search result page where related questions are recommended to the user  User may click on a question to view the answer  Clicking is a positive feedback that shows user's interest in the question  We use this click logs to build a question classifier using the same model in Figure 3  The problem statement is very similar to BIBREF10 where they use logistic regression to predict whether an user would click on ad  Our goal is to classify if a question is potential high-click question or not for a given query  For this, we first create a labelled data set using the click logs where any question having CTR lower than 0 3 is labelled as 0 and a question having CTR more than 0 7 as 1 
Our final data resembles that of a pair-level classifier, as in Task 1, where user query and candidate questions are input  With these data set, we train a binary classifier to detect high-click and low-click questions 
Quantitative Analysis
For both tasks, we compute classification accuracy using three model variants and report the results in Table 1 and Table 2  We observe that model with both attention and conflict combined gives the best results 
We also show the training loss curve for both the models having attention and attention combined with conflict respectively  Figure 4 and 5 shows these curves for Task 1 and Task 2 respectively  The curves are smoothed using moving average having an window size of 8  We notice that the conflict model has much steeper slope and converges to a much better minima in both the tasks  It can also be noticed that in the training procedure for the model which has both attention and conflict, the updates are much smoother 
Qualitative Comparison
We also show qualitative results where we can observe that our model with attention and conflict combined does better on cases where pairs are non-duplicate and has very small difference  We have observed that the conflict model is very sensitive to even minor differences and compensates in such cases where attention poses high bias towards similarities already there in the sequences 
Sequence 1: What are the best ways to learn French ?
Sequence 2: How do I learn french genders ?
Attention only: 1
Attention+Conflict: 0
Ground Truth: 0
Sequence 1: How do I prevent breast cancer ?
Sequence 2: Is breast cancer preventable ?
Attention only: 1
Attention+Conflict: 0
Ground Truth: 0
We provide two examples with predictions from the models with only attention and combination of attention and conflict  Each example is accompanied by the ground truth in our data 
Analyzing the gains
We analyzed the gains in Task 1 which we get from the attention-conflict model in order to ensure that they are not due to randomness in weight initialization or simply additional parameters  We particularly focused on the examples which were incorrectly marked in attention model but correctly in attention-conflict model  We saw that 70% of those cases are the ones where the pair was incorrectly marked as duplicate in the previous model but our combined model correctly marked them as non-duplicate 
Conclusion
In this work, we highlighted the limits of attention especially in cases where two sequences have a contradicting relationship based on the task it performs  To alleviate this problem and further improve the performance, we propose a conflict mechanism that tries to capture how two sequences repel each other  This acts like the inverse of attention and, empirically, we show that how conflict and attention together can improve the performance 
Future research work should be based on alternative design of conflict mechanism using other difference operators other than element wise difference which we use 

ground_truth: The baseline system for the SLC task is a very simple logistic regression classifier with default parameters. The baseline for the FLC task generates spans and selects one of the 18 techniques randomly.

SLC task is a very simple logistic regression classifier, FLC task generates spans and selects one of the 18 techniques randomly