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We present the ARC-DA dataset, a direct-answer (open response, freeform) version of the ARC (AI2 Reasoning Challenge) multiple-choice dataset. While ARC has been influential in the community, its multiple-choice format is unrepresentative of real-world questions, and multiple choice formats can be particularly susceptible to artifacts. The ARC-DA dataset addresses these concerns by converting questions to direct-answer format using a combination of crowdsourcing and expert review. The resulting dataset contains 2985 questions with a total of 8436 valid answers (questions typically have more than one valid answer). ARC-DA is one of the first DA datasets of natural questions that often require reasoning, and where appropriate question decompositions are not evident from the questions themselves. We describe the conversion approach taken, appropriate evaluation metrics, and several strong models. Although high, the best scores (81% GENIE, 61.4% F1, 63.2% ROUGE-L) still leave considerable room for improvement. In addition, the dataset provides a natural setting for new research on explanation, as many questions require reasoning to construct answers. We hope the dataset spurs further advances in complex question-answering by the community. ARC-DA is available at https://allenai.org/data/arc-da
We present a new question set, text corpus, and baselines assembled to encourage AI research in advanced question answering. Together, these constitute the AI2 Reasoning Challenge (ARC), which requires far more powerful knowledge and reasoning than previous challenges such as SQuAD or SNLI. The ARC question set is partitioned into a Challenge Set and an Easy Set, where the Challenge Set contains only questions answered incorrectly by both a retrieval-based algorithm and a word co-occurence algorithm. The dataset contains only natural, grade-school science questions (authored for human tests), and is the largest public-domain set of this kind (7,787 questions). We test several baselines on the Challenge Set, including leading neural models from the SQuAD and SNLI tasks, and find that none are able to significantly outperform a random baseline, reflecting the difficult nature of this task. We are also releasing the ARC Corpus, a corpus of 14M science sentences relevant to the task, and implementations of the three neural baseline models tested. Can your model perform better? We pose ARC as a challenge to the community.
In e-commerce portals, generating answers for product-related questions has become a crucial task. In this paper, we focus on the task of product-aware answer generation, which learns to generate an accurate and complete answer from large-scale unlabeled e-commerce reviews and product attributes. However, safe answer problems pose significant challenges to text generation tasks, and e-commerce question-answering task is no exception. To generate more meaningful answers, in this paper, we propose a novel generative neural model, called the Meaningful Product Answer Generator (MPAG), which alleviates the safe answer problem by taking product reviews, product attributes, and a prototype answer into consideration. Product reviews and product attributes are used to provide meaningful content, while the prototype answer can yield a more diverse answer pattern. To this end, we propose a novel answer generator with a review reasoning module and a prototype answer reader. Our key idea is to obtain the correct question-aware information from a large scale collection of reviews and learn how to write a coherent and meaningful answer from an existing prototype answer. To be more specific, we propose a read-and-write memory consisting of selective writing units to conduct reasoning among these reviews. We then employ a prototype reader consisting of comprehensive matching to extract the answer skeleton from the prototype answer. Finally, we propose an answer editor to generate the final answer by taking the question and the above parts as input. Conducted on a real-world dataset collected from an e-commerce platform, extensive experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations. Human evaluation also demonstrates that our model can consistently generate specific and proper answers.
While day-to-day questions come with a variety of answer types, the current question-answering (QA) literature has failed to adequately address the answer diversity of questions. To this end, we present GooAQ, a large-scale dataset with a variety of answer types. This dataset contains over 5 million questions and 3 million answers collected from Google. GooAQ questions are collected semi-automatically from the Google search engine using its autocomplete feature. This results in naturalistic questions of practical interest that are nonetheless short and expressed using simple language. GooAQ answers are mined from Googles responses to our collected questions, specifically from the answer boxes in the search results. This yields a rich space of answer types, containing both textual answers (short and long) as well as more structured ones such as collections. We benchmarkT5 models on GooAQ and observe that: (a) in line with recent work, LMs strong performance on GooAQs short-answer questions heavily benefit from annotated data; however, (b) their quality in generating coherent and accurate responses for questions requiring long responses (such as how and why questions) is less reliant on observing annotated data and mainly supported by their pre-training. We release GooAQ to facilitate further research on improving QA with diverse response types.
In this paper, the answer selection problem in community question answering (CQA) is regarded as an answer sequence labeling task, and a novel approach is proposed based on the recurrent architecture for this problem. Our approach applies convolution neural networks (CNNs) to learning the joint representation of question-answer pair firstly, and then uses the joint representation as input of the long short-term memory (LSTM) to learn the answer sequence of a question for labeling the matching quality of each answer. Experiments conducted on the SemEval 2015 CQA dataset shows the effectiveness of our approach.
In education, open-ended quiz questions have become an important tool for assessing the knowledge of students. Yet, manually preparing such questions is a tedious task, and thus automatic question generation has been proposed as a possible alternative. So far, the vast majority of research has focused on generating the question text, relying on question answering datasets with readily picked answers, and the problem of how to come up with answer candidates in the first place has been largely ignored. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we propose a model that can generate a specified number of answer candidates for a given passage of text, which can then be used by instructors to write questions manually or can be passed as an input to automatic answer-aware question generators. Our experiments show that our proposed answer candidate generation model outperforms several baselines.