Learn to Resolve Conversational Dependency: A Consistency Training Framework for Conversational Question Answering

Gangwoo Kim, Hyunjae Kim, Jungsoo Park, Jaewoo Kang


Abstract
One of the main challenges in conversational question answering (CQA) is to resolve the conversational dependency, such as anaphora and ellipsis. However, existing approaches do not explicitly train QA models on how to resolve the dependency, and thus these models are limited in understanding human dialogues. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, ExCorD (Explicit guidance on how to resolve Conversational Dependency) to enhance the abilities of QA models in comprehending conversational context. ExCorD first generates self-contained questions that can be understood without the conversation history, then trains a QA model with the pairs of original and self-contained questions using a consistency-based regularizer. In our experiments, we demonstrate that ExCorD significantly improves the QA models’ performance by up to 1.2 F1 on QuAC, and 5.2 F1 on CANARD, while addressing the limitations of the existing approaches.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.478
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6130–6141
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.478
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.478
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gangwoo Kim, Hyunjae Kim, Jungsoo Park, and Jaewoo Kang. 2021. Learn to Resolve Conversational Dependency: A Consistency Training Framework for Conversational Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6130–6141, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learn to Resolve Conversational Dependency: A Consistency Training Framework for Conversational Question Answering (Kim et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.478.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.478.mp4
Code
 dmis-lab/excord
Data
CANARDCoQAQuAC