Dafna Shahaf

Playing by the Book: An Interactive Game Approach for Action Graph Extraction from Text

2019

Understanding procedural text requires tracking entities, actions and effects as the narrative unfolds. We focus on the challenging real-world problem of action-graph extraction from materials science papers, where language is highly specialized and data annotation …

“Alexa, Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” Characterizing Playful Requests to Conversational Agents

2022 · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts

Conversational Agents (CAs) such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are well-suited for task-oriented interactions (“Call Jason”), but other interaction types are often beyond their capabilities. One notable example is playful requests: for example, people …

Dyna-bAbI: unlocking bAbI's potential with dynamic synthetic benchmarking

2021 · arXiv (Cornell University)

While neural language models often perform surprisingly well on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, their strengths and limitations remain poorly understood. Controlled synthetic tasks are thus an increasingly important resource for diagnosing model behavior. In …

Breakpoint Transformers for Modeling and Tracking Intermediate Beliefs

2022 · arXiv (Cornell University)

Can we teach natural language understanding models to track their beliefs through intermediate points in text? We propose a representation learning framework called breakpoint modeling that allows for learning of this type. Given any text …