HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data

Wenhu Chen, Hanwen Zha, Zhiyu Chen, Wenhan Xiong, Hong Wang, William Yang Wang


Abstract
Existing question answering datasets focus on dealing with homogeneous information, based either only on text or KB/Table information alone. However, as human knowledge is distributed over heterogeneous forms, using homogeneous information alone might lead to severe coverage problems. To fill in the gap, we present HybridQA, a new large-scale question-answering dataset that requires reasoning on heterogeneous information. Each question is aligned with a Wikipedia table and multiple free-form corpora linked with the entities in the table. The questions are designed to aggregate both tabular information and text information, i.e., lack of either form would render the question unanswerable. We test with three different models: 1) a table-only model. 2) text-only model. 3) a hybrid model that combines heterogeneous information to find the answer. The experimental results show that the EM scores obtained by two baselines are below 20%, while the hybrid model can achieve an EM over 40%. This gap suggests the necessity to aggregate heterogeneous information in HybridQA. However, the hybrid model’s score is still far behind human performance. Hence, HybridQA can serve as a challenging benchmark to study question answering with heterogeneous information.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.91
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1026–1036
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.91
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.91
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenhu Chen, Hanwen Zha, Zhiyu Chen, Wenhan Xiong, Hong Wang, and William Yang Wang. 2020. HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 1026–1036, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data (Chen et al., Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.91.pdf
Code
 wenhuchen/HybridQA +  additional community code
Data
HybridQADROPHotpotQAMetaQANatural QuestionsSQuADTriviaQAWebQuestions