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Register a new userQAConv: Question Answering on Informative Conversations
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Chien-Sheng Wu
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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This paper introduces QAConv, a new question answering (QA) dataset that uses conversations as a knowledge source. We focus on informative conversations including business emails, panel discussions, and work channels. Unlike open-domain and task-oriented dialogues, these conversations are usually long, complex, asynchronous, and involve strong domain knowledge. In total, we collect 34,204 QA pairs, including span-based, free-form, and unanswerable questions, from 10,259 selected conversations with both human-written and machine-generated questions. We segment long conversations into chunks, and use a question generator and dialogue summarizer as auxiliary tools to collect multi-hop questions. The dataset has two testing scenarios, chunk mode and full mode, depending on whether the grounded chunk is provided or retrieved from a large conversational pool. Experimental results show that state-of-the-art QA systems trained on existing QA datasets have limited zero-shot ability and tend to predict our questions as unanswerable. Fine-tuning such systems on our corpus can achieve significant improvement up to 23.6% and 13.6% in both chunk mode and full mode, respectively.
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Question answering (QA) systems provide a way of querying the information available in various formats including, but not limited to, unstructured and structured data in natural languages. It constitutes a considerable part of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) which has led to the introduction of a special research topic on Conversational Question Answering (CQA), wherein a system is required to understand the given context and then engages in multi-turn QA to satisfy the users information needs. Whilst the focus of most of the existing research work is subjected to single-turn QA, the field of multi-turn QA has recently grasped attention and prominence owing to the availability of large-scale, multi-turn QA datasets and the development of pre-trained language models. With a good amount of models and research papers adding to the literature every year recently, there is a dire need of arranging and presenting the related work in a unified manner to streamline future research. This survey, therefore, is an effort to present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research trends of CQA primarily based on reviewed papers from 2016-2021. Our findings show that there has been a trend shift from single-turn to multi-turn QA which empowers the field of Conversational AI from different perspectives. This survey is intended to provide an epitome for the research community with the hope of laying a strong foundation for the field of CQA.
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.
Spoken question answering (SQA) is a challenging task that requires the machine to fully understand the complex spoken documents. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) plays a significant role in the development of QA systems. However, the recent work shows that ASR systems generate highly noisy transcripts, which critically limit the capability of machine comprehension on the SQA task. To address the issue, we present a novel distillation framework. Specifically, we devise a training strategy to perform knowledge distillation (KD) from spoken documents and written counterparts. Our work makes a step towards distilling knowledge from the language model as a supervision signal to lead to better student accuracy by reducing the misalignment between automatic and manual transcriptions. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art language models on the Spoken-SQuAD dataset.
Spoken conversational question answering (SCQA) requires machines to model complex dialogue flow given the speech utterances and text corpora. Different from traditional text question answering (QA) tasks, SCQA involves audio signal processing, passage comprehension, and contextual understanding. However, ASR systems introduce unexpected noisy signals to the transcriptions, which result in performance degradation on SCQA. To overcome the problem, we propose CADNet, a novel contextualized attention-based distillation approach, which applies both cross-attention and self-attention to obtain ASR-robust contextualized embedding representations of the passage and dialogue history for performance improvements. We also introduce the spoken conventional knowledge distillation framework to distill the ASR-robust knowledge from the estimated probabilities of the teacher model to the student. We conduct extensive experiments on the Spoken-CoQA dataset and demonstrate that our approach achieves remarkable performance in this task.
Current open-domain question answering systems often follow a Retriever-Reader architecture, where the retriever first retrieves relevant passages and the reader then reads the retrieved passages to form an answer. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective passage reranking method, named Reader-guIDEd Reranker (RIDER), which does not involve training and reranks the retrieved passages solely based on the top predictions of the reader before reranking. We show that RIDER, despite its simplicity, achieves 10 to 20 absolute gains in top-1 retrieval accuracy and 1 to 4 Exact Match (EM) gains without refining the retriever or reader. In addition, RIDER, without any training, outperforms state-of-the-art transformer-based supervised rerankers. Remarkably, RIDER achieves 48.3 EM on the Natural Questions dataset and 66.4 EM on the TriviaQA dataset when only 1,024 tokens (7.8 passages on average) are used as the reader input after passage reranking.
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