Abstract:
Commonsense knowledge, such as knowing that 'bumping into people annoys
them' or 'rain makes the road slippery', helps humans navigate everyday
situations seamlessly. Yet, endowing machines with such human-like
commonsense reasoning capabilities has remained an elusive goal of
artificial intelligence research for decades. In recent years, commonsense
knowledge and reasoning have received renewed attention from the natural
language processing (NLP) community, yielding exploratory studies in
automated commonsense understanding. We organize this tutorial to provide
researchers with the critical foundations and recent advances in
commonsense representation and reasoning, in the hopes of casting a
brighter light on this promising area of future research. In our tutorial,
we will (1) outline the various types of commonsense (e.g., physical,
social), and (2) discuss techniques to gather and represent commonsense
knowledge, while highlighting the challenges specific to this type of
knowledge (e.g., reporting bias). We will then (3) discuss the types of
commonsense knowledge captured by modern NLP systems (e.g., large
pretrained language models), and (4) present ways to measure systems'
commonsense reasoning abilities. We will finish with (5) a discussion of
various ways in which commonsense reasoning can be used to improve
performance on NLP tasks, exemplified by an (6) interactive session on
integrating commonsense into a downstream
task.