No Arabic abstract
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 data 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 5,049 questions over 1,585 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.
Despite significant interest in developing general purpose fact checking models, it is challenging to construct a large-scale fact verification dataset with realistic claims that would occur in the real world. Existing claims are either authored by crowdworkers, thereby introducing subtle biases that are difficult to control for, or manually verified by professional fact checkers, causing them to be expensive and limited in scale. In this paper, we construct a challenging, realistic, and large-scale fact verification dataset called FaVIQ, using information-seeking questions posed by real users who do not know how to answer. The ambiguity in information-seeking questions enables automatically constructing true and false claims that reflect confusions arisen from users (e.g., the year of the movie being filmed vs. being released). Our claims are verified to be natural, contain little lexical bias, and require a complete understanding of the evidence for verification. Our experiments show that the state-of-the-art models are far from solving our new task. Moreover, training on our data helps in professional fact-checking, outperforming models trained on the most widely used dataset FEVER or in-domain data by up to 17% absolute. Altogether, our data will serve as a challenging benchmark for natural language understanding and support future progress in professional fact checking.
Open-ended human learning and information-seeking are increasingly mediated by digital assistants. However, such systems often ignore the users pre-existing knowledge. Assuming a correlation between engagement and user responses such as liking messages or asking followup questions, we design a Wizard-of-Oz dialog task that tests the hypothesis that engagement increases when users are presented with facts related to what they know. Through crowd-sourcing of this experiment, we collect and release 14K dialogs (181K utterances) where users and assistants converse about geographic topics like geopolitical entities and locations. This dataset is annotated with pre-existing user knowledge, message-level dialog acts, grounding to Wikipedia, and user reactions to messages. Responses using a users prior knowledge increase engagement. We incorporate this knowledge into a multi-task model that reproduces human assistant policies and improves over a BERT content model by 13 mean reciprocal rank points.
Matching question-answer relations between two turns in conversations is not only the first step in analyzing dialogue structures, but also valuable for training dialogue systems. This paper presents a QA matching model considering both distance information and dialogue history by two simultaneous attention mechanisms called mutual attention. Given scores computed by the trained model between each non-question turn with its candidate questions, a greedy matching strategy is used for final predictions. Because existing dialogue datasets such as the Ubuntu dataset are not suitable for the QA matching task, we further create a dataset with 1,000 labeled dialogues and demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art and other strong baselines, particularly for matching long-distance QA pairs.
Generating syntactically and semantically valid and relevant questions from paragraphs is useful with many applications. Manual generation is a labour-intensive task, as it requires the reading, parsing and understanding of long passages of text. A number of question generation models based on sequence-to-sequence techniques have recently been proposed. Most of them generate questions from sentences only, and none of them is publicly available as an easy-to-use service. In this paper, we demonstrate ParaQG, a Web-based system for generating questions from sentences and paragraphs. ParaQG incorporates a number of novel functionalities to make the question generation process user-friendly. It provides an interactive interface for a user to select answers with visual insights on generation of questions. It also employs various faceted views to group similar questions as well as filtering techniques to eliminate unanswerable questions
Automatic question generation (AQG) has broad applicability in domains such as tutoring systems, conversational agents, healthcare literacy, and information retrieval. Existing efforts at AQG have been limited to short answer lengths of up to two or three sentences. However, several real-world applications require question generation from answers that span several sentences. Therefore, we propose a novel evaluation benchmark to assess the performance of existing AQG systems for long-text answers. We leverage the large-scale open-source Google Natural Questions dataset to create the aforementioned long-answer AQG benchmark. We empirically demonstrate that the performance of existing AQG methods significantly degrades as the length of the answer increases. Transformer-based methods outperform other existing AQG methods on long answers in terms of automatic as well as human evaluation. However, we still observe degradation in the performance of our best performing models with increasing sentence length, suggesting that long answer QA is a challenging benchmark task for future research.