A Survey of Abstraction Knowledge: Philosophy, Acquisition, Resources, and LLM Reasoning Applications

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey of Abstraction Knowledge: Philosophy, Acquisition, Resources, 
and LLM Reasoning Applications"

by

Mr. Zhaowei WANG


Abstract:

Abstraction is about finding common properties among different things and 
forming a broader concept, like the concept "furniture," subsuming "sofa," and 
"table." This ability is a key aspect of human cognition, allowing people to 
manage daily situations effectively by learning from past experiences and 
generalizing to new circumstances with minimal practice. In the NLP community, 
integrating abstraction knowledge into NLP systems has long been a classic 
challenge. In this survey, we review dozens of papers on abstraction and 
provide a comprehensive overview. We first discuss the cognitive and 
linguistic background of abstraction, as well as its comparison with similar 
linguistic concepts. Next, we explore recent efforts to build abstraction 
knowledge bases and group existing resources into entity-level and event-level 
categories. For each category, we synthesize representative studies and 
highlight their strengths and weaknesses. We then examine the application of 
abstraction knowledge in various areas, including enhancing the conceptual 
understanding of LLMs, strengthening LLMs' reasoning ability, and improving 
performance on downstream tasks. Finally, we summarize the progress and 
remaining challenges in the whole field, reflecting on future directions for 
abstraction knowledge in NLP.


Date:                   Wednesday, 21 August 2024

Time:                   10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 3494
                        Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:      Dr. Yangqiu Song (Supervisor)
                        Dr. Long Chen (Chairperson)
                        Dr. Junxian He
                        Dr. Xiaojuan Ma