Is the Understanding of Explicit Discourse Relations Required in Machine Reading Comprehension?

Yulong Wu, Viktor Schlegel, Riza Batista-Navarro


Abstract
An in-depth analysis of the level of language understanding required by existing Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) benchmarks can provide insight into the reading capabilities of machines. In this paper, we propose an ablation-based methodology to assess the extent to which MRC datasets evaluate the understanding of explicit discourse relations. We define seven MRC skills which require the understanding of different discourse relations. We then introduce ablation methods that verify whether these skills are required to succeed on a dataset. By observing the drop in performance of neural MRC models evaluated on the original and the modified dataset, we can measure to what degree the dataset requires these skills, in order to be understood correctly. Experiments on three large-scale datasets with the BERT-base and ALBERT-xxlarge model show that the relative changes for all skills are small (less than 6%). These results imply that most of the answered questions in the examined datasets do not require understanding the discourse structure of the text. To specifically probe for natural language understanding, there is a need to design more challenging benchmarks that can correctly evaluate the intended skills.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.311
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3565–3579
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.311
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.311
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yulong Wu, Viktor Schlegel, and Riza Batista-Navarro. 2021. Is the Understanding of Explicit Discourse Relations Required in Machine Reading Comprehension?. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 3565–3579, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Is the Understanding of Explicit Discourse Relations Required in Machine Reading Comprehension? (Wu et al., EACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.311.pdf
Code
 yulong-w/mrcdr
Data
SQuADSWAG