This repository contains code to generate the bAbI tasks as described in the paper Towards AI-Complete Question Answering: A Set of Prerequisite Toy Tasks. Please cite the paper if you use this code in your work (bibtex entry here).
Contents
This project requires Torch to be installed. The easiest way to install Torch is by following the installation instructions at torch/distro. To use the library, install it with LuaRocks by running the following command from the root directory.
luarocks make babitasks-scm-1.rockspecTo generate a task, run the command
babi-tasks <task-id>where <task-id> is either a class name (like PathFinding) or the task
number (e.g. 19). To quickly generate 1000 examples of each task, you can use
for i in `seq 1 20`; do babi-tasks $i 1000 > task_$i.txt; doneThe tasks in babi/tasks correspond to those from the original dataset as
follows:
| # | Task | Class name |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Basic factoid QA with single supporting fact | WhereIsActor |
| 2 | Factoid QA with two supporting facts | WhereIsObject |
| 3 | Factoid QA with three supporting facts | WhereWasObject |
| 4 | Two argument relations: subject vs. object | IsDir |
| 5 | Three argument relations | WhoWhatGave |
| 6 | Yes/No questions | IsActorThere |
| 7 | Counting | Counting |
| 8 | Lists/Sets | Listing |
| 9 | Simple Negation | Negation |
| 10 | Indefinite Knowledge | Indefinite |
| 11 | Basic coreference | BasicCoreference |
| 12 | Conjunction | Conjunction |
| 13 | Compound coreference | CompoundCoreference |
| 14 | Time manipulation | Time |
| 15 | Basic deduction | Deduction |
| 16 | Basic induction | Induction |
| 17 | Positional reasoning | PositionalReasoning |
| 18 | Reasoning about size | Size |
| 19 | Path finding | PathFinding |
| 20 | Reasoning about agent's motivation | Motivations |
Note: This code is a rewrite of the original code that was used to generate the publicly available dataset at fb.ai/babi. As such, it is not possible to produce exactly the same dataset. However, we have verified that numbers obtained are very similar.
Some tasks accept configuration flags that will change their output.
In both the PathFinding and Size the number of inference steps required
to answer the question can be changed. You can also control the number of
"decoys" (locations that are not part of the path).
babi-tasks PathFinding --path-length 3 --decoys 1
babi-tasks Size --steps 3Currently the path length plus the number of decoys has to be 5 or less. Similarly, the number of size comparisons cannot be more than 5.
For tasks involving people moving around, the use of coreferences and
conjunctions can be controlled with the flags --coreference and
--conjunction. These flags take a number between 0 and 1 as an argument,
determining the fraction of the time coreferences and conjunctions are used
respectively.
babi-tasks WhereIsActor --coreference 1.0Tasks can also be rendered in a more symbolic manner. Use the flag --symbolic
true to enable this.:
1 H teleport N 2 H teleport F 3 eval H is_in F 2
Tasks are generated through simulation: We have a world containing entities, and actions that can add new entities to the world, or modify entities' states. Simulations then just take the form of sampling actions that are valid.
We often want to ask questions that require some sort of logical inference. Some types of inference can be re-used in multiple tasks, for example the deduction that a person and the object they are holding are in the same place is used several times. For this reason, some of the reasoning has been factored out: We keep track of what the reader of a story knows about the world, and each time a new line is read, we update this knowledge.
What follows is a brief overview of the classes and concepts used, which should help guide the understanding of the code.
A world is a collection of entities. Worlds can be loaded from text files such
as those found in babi/tasks/worlds using the world:load(filename)
command.
All concepts and objects in the simulations are entities. They are effectively Lua tables that describe the entity's properties.
Actions modify the state of the world. Each action is performed by an entity, even actions like setting the location or size of another entity (these are usually performed by the entity "god").
An action's is_valid method will test whether an action can be performed
e.g. John cannot move to the kitchen if he is already there. The perform
method assumes that the action is valid, and modifies the world accordingly
i.e. it will change the location of John.
Lastly, actions can update the reader's knowledge of the world. For example, if we know that John is in the kitchen, the action "John grabs the milk" informs the reader that the milk is in the kitchen as well.
The Knowledge class keeps track of what a reader currently knows about the
world. When actions are performed, the Action.update_knowledge method can
update this knowledge accordingly. For example, when Knowledge contains
the information that John is in the kitchen, the action of dropping the milk
will result in the knowledge being updated to say that the milk is in the
kitchen, and that it isn't being held by anyone.
The Knowledge class takes into account some basic logical rules. For
example, some properties are "exclusive" in the sense that only one value can be
true (John cannot be in the kitchen and the garden at the same time, but he can
be not in the kitchen and not in the garden at the same time). Reversely, this
means that if John is in the garden, the reader knows that he is not in the
kitchen.
We keep track of which actions gave us which pieces of information about the world. This way, we can provide the user with the supporting facts when asking questions.
Facts about the world are expressed as clauses of the form (truth value,
actor, action, arguments). For example (true, john, teleport, kitchen)
means that John moved to the kitchen, while (false, john, drop, milk)
means that John did not drop the milk. Note that because all information
must be conveyed as actions, the sentence "John is in the garden" is
represented as (true, god, set_property, is_in, garden).
A question is represented as a tuple of the form (question type, clause,
support).
1 John is in the garden.2 Where is John? garden 1
This story is represented as a clause, clause = (true, god, set_property,
john, is_in, garden), followed by a question, question = (evaluate, clause,
{1}). A question like "Is john in the garden?" would instead be represented as
question = (yes_no, clause, {1}).
After the simulation is complete, a story (task) is nothing more but a list of
clauses and questions. We turn this into text using the stringify
function. This function performs a simple process: It repeatedly tries to find
templates that can turn the next clause(s) or question(s) into text. It randomly
samples a template from the matching ones, and goes on to the next clause that
needs to be converted.
Templates can be selected further based on configuration (each task has a default configuration, but they can be passed through the command line as well). This enables turning on things like coreferences, conjunctions, etc.
- Jason Weston, Antoine Bordes, Sumit Chopra, Tomas Mikolov, Alexander M. Rush, Bart van Merriënboer, "Towards AI-Complete Question Answering: A Set of Prerequisite Toy Tasks", arXiv:1502.05698 [cs.AI].
- Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Arthur Szlam, Jason Weston, Rob Fergus, "End-To-End Memory Networks", arXiv:1503.08895 [cs.NE].