Cited by 316Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesMultimodal Machine Learning Applications

Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Models

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Press, Ofir, Zhang, Muru, Min, Sewon, Schmidt, Ludwig, Smith, Noah, Lewis, Mike·2023·Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Abstract

We investigate the ability of language models to perform compositional reasoning tasks where the overall solution depends on correctly composing the answers to sub-problems.We measure how often models can correctly answer all sub-problems but not generate the overall solution, a ratio we call the compositionality gap.We evaluate this ratio by asking multi-hop questions with answers that require composing multiple facts unlikely to have been observed together during pretraining.In the GPT-3 family of models, as model size increases we show that the single-hop question answering performance improves faster than the multi-hop performance does, therefore the compositionality gap does not decrease.This surprising result suggests that while more powerful models memorize and recall more factual knowledge, they show no corresponding improvement in their ability to perform this kind of compositional reasoning.We then demonstrate how elicitive prompting (such as chain of thought) narrows the compositionality gap by reasoning explicitly.We present a new method, self-ask, that further improves on chain of thought.In our method, the model explicitly asks itself (and answers) follow-up questions before answering the initial question.We finally show that self-ask's structured prompting lets us easily plug in a search engine to answer the follow-up questions, which additionally improves accuracy.

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Authors
Press, O., Zhang, M., Min, S., Schmidt, L., Smith, N., & Lewis, M.
Affiliations
  • University of Washington (US)
  • Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (US)
Corresponding author
Press, Ofir
Venue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Published
2023
Pages
5687-5711
OpenAlex
W4389520103
Cited by
303
References
61
Citations by year
2026: 97 · 2025: 90 · 2024: 46 · 2023: 69 · 2022: 1
FWCI
53.42
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP (Findings of EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
National Science Foundation (2113530)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
Keywords
compositional reasoning, multi-hop question answering, chain-of-thought prompting, GPT-3, model size scaling, structured prompting, search engine integration

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