Modeling actions and state changes for a machine reading comprehension dataset

Artificial general intelligence consists of many components, one of which is Natural Language Understanding (NLU). One of the applications of NLU is Reading Comprehension where it is expected that a system understand all aspects of a text. Further, understanding natural procedure-describing text that deals with existence of entities and effects of actions on these entities while doing reasoning and inference at the same time is a particularly difficult task. A recent natural language dataset by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, ProPara, attempted to address the challenges to determine entity existence and entity tracking in natural text.

As part of this work, an attempt is made to address the ProPara challenge. The Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) community has developed effective techniques for modeling and reasoning about actions and similar techniques are used in this work. A system consisting of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) and Answer Set Programming (ASP) is used to address the challenge and achieves close to state-of-the-art results and provides an explainable model. An existing semantic role label parser is modified and used to parse the dataset.

On analysis of the learnt model, it was found that some of the rules were not generic enough. To overcome the issue, the Proposition Bank dataset is then used to add knowledge in an attempt to generalize the ILP learnt rules to possibly improve the results.