Large-scale pretrained language models are the major driving force behind recent improvements in perfromance on the Winograd Schema Challenge, a widely employed test of commonsense reasoning ability. We show, however, with a new diagnostic dataset, that these models are sensitive to linguistic perturbations of the Winograd examples that minimally affect human understanding. Our results highlight interesting differences between humans and language models: language models are more sensitive to number or gender alternations and synonym replacements than humans, and humans are more stable and consistent in their predictions, maintain a much higher absolute performance, and perform better on non-associative instances than associative ones.

Humans do not make inferences over texts, but over models of what texts are about. When annotators are asked to annotate coreferent spans of text, it is therefore a somewhat unnatural task. This paper presents an alternative in which we preprocess documents, linking entities to a knowledge base, and turn the coreference annotation task – in our case limited to pronouns – into an annotation task where annotators are asked to assign pronouns to entities. Model-based annotation is shown to lead to faster annotation and higher inter-annotator agreement, and we argue that it also opens up an alternative approach to coreference resolution. We present two new coreference benchmark datasets, for English Wikipedia and English teacher-student dialogues, and evaluate state-of-the-art coreference resolvers on them.

Frame-semantic annotations exist for a tiny fraction of the world’s languages, Wikidata, however, links knowledge base triples to texts in many languages, providing a common, distant supervision signal for semantic parsers. We present WikiBank, a multilingual resource of partial semantic structures that can be used to extend pre-existing resources rather than creating new man-made resources from scratch. We also integrate this form of supervision into an off-the-shelf frame-semantic parser and allow cross-lingual transfer. Using Google’s Sling architecture, we show significant improvements on the English and Spanish CoNLL 2009 datasets, whether training on the full available datasets or small subsamples thereof.

We present a named entity annotation for the Danish Universal Dependencies treebank using the CoNLL-2003 annotation scheme: DaNE. It is the largest publicly available, Danish named entity gold annotation. We evaluate the quality of our annotations intrinsically by double annotating the entire treebank and extrinsically by comparing our annotations to a recently released named entity annotation of the validation and test sections of the Danish Universal Dependencies treebank. We benchmark the new resource by training and evaluating competitive architectures for supervised named entity recognition (NER), including FLAIR, monolingual (Danish) BERT and multilingual BERT. We explore cross-lingual transfer in multilingual BERT from five related languages in zero-shot and direct transfer setups, and we show that even with our modestly-sized training set, we improve Danish NER over a recent cross-lingual approach, as well as over zero-shot transfer from five related languages. Using multilingual BERT, we achieve higher performance by fine-tuning on both DaNE and a larger Bokmål (Norwegian) training set compared to only using DaNE. However, the highest performance isachieved by using a Danish BERT fine-tuned on DaNE. Our dataset enables improvements and applicability for Danish NER beyond cross-lingual methods. We employ a thorough error analysis of the predictions of the best models for seen and unseen entities, as well as their robustness on un-capitalized text. The annotated dataset and all the trained models are made publicly available.