Unsupervised Question Decomposition for Question Answering

Ethan Perez, Patrick Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Kyunghyun Cho, Douwe Kiela


Abstract
We aim to improve question answering (QA) by decomposing hard questions into simpler sub-questions that existing QA systems are capable of answering. Since labeling questions with decompositions is cumbersome, we take an unsupervised approach to produce sub-questions, also enabling us to leverage millions of questions from the internet. Specifically, we propose an algorithm for One-to-N Unsupervised Sequence transduction (ONUS) that learns to map one hard, multi-hop question to many simpler, single-hop sub-questions. We answer sub-questions with an off-the-shelf QA model and give the resulting answers to a recomposition model that combines them into a final answer. We show large QA improvements on HotpotQA over a strong baseline on the original, out-of-domain, and multi-hop dev sets. ONUS automatically learns to decompose different kinds of questions, while matching the utility of supervised and heuristic decomposition methods for QA and exceeding those methods in fluency. Qualitatively, we find that using sub-questions is promising for shedding light on why a QA system makes a prediction.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.713
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:
8864–8880
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.713
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.713
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ethan Perez, Patrick Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Kyunghyun Cho, and Douwe Kiela. 2020. Unsupervised Question Decomposition for Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8864–8880, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unsupervised Question Decomposition for Question Answering (Perez et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.713.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938683
Code
 facebookresearch/UnsupervisedDecomposition +  additional community code
Data
CLEVRFEVERHotpotQA