Dominican Republic

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 \emph{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 \emph{answers} are mined from Google&#39;s 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 benchmark T5 models on GooAQ and observe that: (a) in line with recent work, LM&#39;s strong performance on GooAQ&#39;s 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&#39; and `why&#39; 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.

EMNLP 2021

GooAQ: Open Question Answering with Diverse Answer Types

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

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 \emph{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 \emph{answers} are mined from Google's 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 benchmark T5 models on GooAQ and observe that: (a) in line with recent work, LM's strong performance on GooAQ's 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.

technical paper

Complex question answering over knowledge base remains as a challenging task because it involves reasoning over multiple pieces of information, including intermediate entities/relations and other constraints. Previous methods simplify the SPARQL query of a question into such forms as a list or a graph, missing such constraints as "filter" and "order_by", and present models specialized for generating those simplified forms from a given question. We instead introduce a novel approach that directly generates an executable SPARQL query without simplification, addressing the issue of generating unseen entities. We adapt large scale pre-trained encoder-decoder models and show that our method significantly outperforms the previous methods and also that our method has higher interpretability and computational efficiency than the previous methods.

Unseen Entity Handling in Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base via Language Generation

This work presents a novel four-stage open-domain QA pipeline R2-D2 (Rank twice, reaD twice). The pipeline is composed of a retriever, passage reranker, extractive reader, generative reader and a mechanism that aggregates the final prediction from all system's components. We demonstrate its strength across three open-domain QA datasets: NaturalQuestions, TriviaQA and EfficientQA, surpassing state-of-the-art on the first two. Our analysis demonstrates that: (i) combining extractive and generative reader yields absolute improvements up to 5 exact match and it is at least twice as effective as the posterior averaging ensemble of the same models with different parameters, (ii) the extractive reader with fewer parameters can match the performance of the generative reader on extractive QA datasets.

{R2-D2}: A Modular Baseline for Open-Domain Question Answering

We tackle multi-choice question answering. Acquiring related commonsense knowledge to the question and options facilitates the recognition of the correct answer. However, the current reasoning models suffer from the noises in the retrieved knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel encoding method which is able to conduct interception and soft filtering. This contributes to the harvesting and absorption of representative information with less interference from noises. We experiment on CommonsenseQA. Experimental results illustrate that our method yields substantial and consistent improvements compared to the strong Bert, RoBERTa and Albert-based baselines.

Winnowing Knowledge for Multi-choice Question Answering

Pre-trained language-vision models have
shown remarkable performance on the visual
question answering (VQA) task. However,
most pre-trained models are trained by only
considering monolingual learning, especially
the resource-rich language like English.
Training such models for multilingual setups demand high computing resources and
multilingual language-vision dataset which
hinders their application in practice. To
alleviate these challenges, we propose a
knowledge distillation approach to extend
an English language-vision model (teacher)
into an equally effective multilingual and
code-mixed model (student). Unlike the existing knowledge distillation methods, which
only use the output from the last layer of the
teacher network for distillation, our student
model learns and imitates the teacher from
multiple intermediate layers (language and
vision encoders) with appropriately designed
distillation objectives for incremental knowledge extraction. We also create the large-scale
multilingual and code-mixed VQA dataset in
eleven different language setups considering
the multiple Indian and European languages.
Experimental results and in-depth analysis
show the effectiveness of the proposed VQA
model over the pre-trained language-vision
models on eleven diverse language setups.

Towards Developing a Multilingual and Code-Mixed Visual Question Answering System by Knowledge Distillation

Question answering models struggle to generalize to novel compositions of training patterns. Current end-to-end models learn a flat input embedding which can lose input syntax context. Prior approaches improve generalization by learning permutation invariant models, but these methods do not scale to more complex train-test splits. We propose Grounded Graph Decoding, a method to improve compositional generalization of language representations by grounding structured predictions with an attention mechanism. Grounding enables the model to retain syntax information from the input that significantly improves generalization to complex inputs. By predicting a structured graph containing conjunctions of query clauses, we learn a group invariant representation without making assumptions on the target domain. Our model performs competitively on the Compositional Freebase Questions (CFQ) dataset, a challenging benchmark for compositional generalization in question answering. Especially, our model effectively solves the MCD1 split with 98% accuracy. All source is available at https://github.com/gaiyu0/cfq.

Grounded Graph Decoding improves Compositional Generalization in Question Answering

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) is to answer natural language questions posed over knowledge bases (KBs). This paper targets at empowering the IR-based KBQA models with the ability of numerical reasoning for answering ordinal constrained questions. A major challenge is the lack of explicit annotations about numerical properties. To address this challenge, we propose a pretraining numerical reasoning model consisting of NumGNN and NumTransformer, guided by explicit self-supervision signals. The two modules are pretrained to encode the magnitude and ordinal properties of numbers respectively and can serve as model-agnostic plugins for any IR-based KBQA model to enhance its numerical reasoning ability. Extensive experiments on two KBQA benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our method to enhance the numerical reasoning ability for IR-based KBQA models.

A Pretraining Numerical Reasoning Model for Ordinal Constrained Question Answering on Knowledge Base

Transformer-based pre-trained models, such as BERT, have achieved remarkable results on machine reading comprehension.
However, due to the constraint of encoding length (e.g., 512 WordPiece tokens), a long document is usually split into multiple chunks that are independently read.
It results in the reading field being limited to individual chunks without information collaboration for long document machine reading comprehension.
To address this problem, we propose RoR, a read-over-read method, which expands the reading field from chunk to document.
Specifically, RoR includes a chunk reader and a document reader.
The former first predicts a set of regional answers for each chunk, which are then compacted into a highly-condensed version of the original document, guaranteeing to be encoded once.
The latter further predicts the global answers from this condensed document.
Eventually, a voting strategy is utilized to aggregate and rerank the regional and global answers for final prediction.
Extensive experiments on two benchmarks QuAC and TriviaQA demonstrate the effectiveness of RoR for long document reading. 
Notably, RoR ranks 1st place on the QuAC leaderboard (https://quac.ai/) at the time of submission (May 17th, 2021).

RoR: Read-over-Read for Long Document Machine Reading Comprehension

Multi-party dialogue machine reading comprehension (MRC) brings tremendous challenge since it involves multiple speakers at one dialogue, resulting in intricate speaker information flows and noisy dialogue contexts. To alleviate such difficulties, previous models focus on how to incorporate these information using complex graph-based modules and additional manually labeled data, which is usually rare in real scenarios. In this paper, we design two labour-free self- and pseudo-self-supervised prediction tasks on speaker and key-utterance to implicitly model the speaker information flows, and capture salient clues in a long dialogue. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets have justified the effectiveness of our method over competitive baselines and current state-of-the-art models.

Self- and Pseudo-self-supervised Prediction of Speaker and Key-utterance for Multi-party Dialogue Reading Comprehension

In Visual Question Answering (VQA), existing bilinear methods focus on the interaction between images and questions. As a result, the answers are either spliced into the questions or utilized as labels only for classification. On the other hand, trilinear models such as the CTI model efficiently utilize the inter-modality information between answers, questions, and images, while ignoring intra-modality information. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new trilinear interaction framework called MIRTT (Learning Multimodal Interaction Representations from Trilinear Transformers), incorporating the attention mechanisms for capturing inter-modality and intra-modality relationships. Moreover, we design a two-stage workflow where a bilinear model reduces the free-form, open-ended VQA problem into a multiple-choice VQA problem. Furthermore, to obtain accurate and generic multimodal representations, we pre-train MIRTT with masked language prediction. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Visual7W Telling task and VQA-1.0 Multiple Choice task and outperforms bilinear baselines on the VQA-2.0, TDIUC and GQA datasets.

MIRTT: Learning Multimodal Interaction Representations from Trilinear Transformers for Visual Question Answering

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a challenging NLP task for it requires to carefully deal with all linguistic granularities from word, sentence to passage. For extractive MRC, the answer span has been shown mostly determined by key evidence linguistic units, in which it is a sentence in most cases. However, we recently discovered that sentences may not be clearly defined in many languages to different extents, so that this causes so-called location unit ambiguity problem and as a result makes it difficult for the model to determine which sentence exactly contains the answer span when sentence itself has not been clearly defined at all. Taking Chinese language as a case study, we explain and analyze such a linguistic phenomenon and correspondingly propose a reader with Explicit Span-Sentence Predication to alleviate such a problem. Our proposed reader eventually helps achieve a new state-of-the-art on Chinese MRC benchmark and shows great potential in dealing with other languages.

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