NAACL 2021long33 citations

TuringAdvice: A Generative and Dynamic Evaluation of Language Use

Rowan Zellers, Ari Holtzman, Elizabeth Clark, Lianhui Qin, Ali Farhadi, Yejin Choi

Abstract

We propose TuringAdvice, a new challenge task and dataset for language understanding models. Given a written situation that a real person is currently facing, a model must generate helpful advice in natural language. Our evaluation framework tests a fundamental aspect of human language understanding: our ability to use language to resolve open-ended situations by communicating with each other. Empirical results show that today’s models struggle at TuringAdvice, even multibillion parameter models finetuned on 600k in-domain training examples. The best model, T5, writes advice that is at least as helpful as human-written advice in only 14% of cases; a much larger non-finetunable GPT3 model does even worse at 4%. This low performance reveals language understanding errors that are hard to spot outside of a generative setting, showing much room for progress.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{zellers-etal-2021-turingadvice,
    title = "{T}uring{A}dvice: A Generative and Dynamic Evaluation of Language Use",
    author = "Zellers, Rowan  and
      Holtzman, Ari  and
      Clark, Elizabeth  and
      Qin, Lianhui  and
      Farhadi, Ali  and
      Choi, Yejin",
    editor = "Toutanova, Kristina  and
      Rumshisky, Anna  and
      Zettlemoyer, Luke  and
      Hakkani-Tur, Dilek  and
      Beltagy, Iz  and
      Bethard, Steven  and
      Cotterell, Ryan  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Zhou, Yichao",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
    month = jun,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.386/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.386",
    pages = "4856--4880"
}
TuringAdvice: A Generative and Dynamic Evaluation of Language Use · NAACL 2021