Readers of academic research papers often read with the goal of answering specific questions. Question Answering systems that can answer those questions can make consumption of the content much more efficient. However, building such tools requires da
ta that reflect the difficulty of the task arising from complex reasoning about claims made in multiple parts of a paper. In contrast, existing information-seeking question answering datasets usually contain questions about generic factoid-type information. We therefore present Qasper, a dataset of 5049 questions over 1585 Natural Language Processing papers. Each question is written by an NLP practitioner who read only the title and abstract of the corresponding paper, and the question seeks information present in the full text. The questions are then answered by a separate set of NLP practitioners who also provide supporting evidence to answers. We find that existing models that do well on other QA tasks do not perform well on answering these questions, underperforming humans by at least 27 F1 points when answering them from entire papers, motivating further research in document-grounded, information-seeking QA, which our dataset is designed to facilitate.
Current commonsense reasoning research focuses on developing models that use commonsense knowledge to answer multiple-choice questions. However, systems designed to answer multiple-choice questions may not be useful in applications that do not provid
e a small list of candidate answers to choose from. As a step towards making commonsense reasoning research more realistic, we propose to study open-ended commonsense reasoning (OpenCSR) --- the task of answering a commonsense question without any pre-defined choices --- using as a resource only a corpus of commonsense facts written in natural language. OpenCSR is challenging due to a large decision space, and because many questions require implicit multi-hop reasoning. As an approach to OpenCSR, we propose DrFact, an efficient Differentiable model for multi-hop Reasoning over knowledge Facts. To evaluate OpenCSR methods, we adapt several popular commonsense reasoning benchmarks, and collect multiple new answers for each test question via crowd-sourcing. Experiments show that DrFact outperforms strong baseline methods by a large margin.
