A Simple Yet Strong Pipeline for HotpotQA

Dirk Groeneveld, Tushar Khot, Mausam, Ashish Sabharwal


Abstract
State-of-the-art models for multi-hop question answering typically augment large-scale language models like BERT with additional, intuitively useful capabilities such as named entity recognition, graph-based reasoning, and question decomposition. However, does their strong performance on popular multi-hop datasets really justify this added design complexity? Our results suggest that the answer may be no, because even our simple pipeline based on BERT, named , performs surprisingly well. Specifically, on HotpotQA, Quark outperforms these models on both question answering and support identification (and achieves performance very close to a RoBERTa model). Our pipeline has three steps: 1) use BERT to identify potentially relevant sentences independently of each other; 2) feed the set of selected sentences as context into a standard BERT span prediction model to choose an answer; and 3) use the sentence selection model, now with the chosen answer, to produce supporting sentences. The strong performance of Quark resurfaces the importance of carefully exploring simple model designs before using popular benchmarks to justify the value of complex techniques.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.711
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8839–8845
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.711
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.711
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dirk Groeneveld, Tushar Khot, Mausam, and Ashish Sabharwal. 2020. A Simple Yet Strong Pipeline for HotpotQA. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8839–8845, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Simple Yet Strong Pipeline for HotpotQA (Groeneveld et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.711.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939231
Data
HotpotQASQuAD