Contrastive Domain Adaptation for Question Answering using Limited Text Corpora

Zhenrui Yue, Bernhard Kratzwald, Stefan Feuerriegel


Abstract
Question generation has recently shown impressive results in customizing question answering (QA) systems to new domains. These approaches circumvent the need for manually annotated training data from the new domain and, instead, generate synthetic question-answer pairs that are used for training. However, existing methods for question generation rely on large amounts of synthetically generated datasets and costly computational resources, which render these techniques widely inaccessible when the text corpora is of limited size. This is problematic as many niche domains rely on small text corpora, which naturally restricts the amount of synthetic data that can be generated. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for domain adaptation called contrastive domain adaptation for QA (CAQA). Specifically, CAQA combines techniques from question generation and domain-invariant learning to answer out-of-domain questions in settings with limited text corpora. Here, we train a QA system on both source data and generated data from the target domain with a contrastive adaptation loss that is incorporated in the training objective. By combining techniques from question generation and domain-invariant learning, our model achieved considerable improvements compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.754
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9575–9593
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.754
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.754
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhenrui Yue, Bernhard Kratzwald, and Stefan Feuerriegel. 2021. Contrastive Domain Adaptation for Question Answering using Limited Text Corpora. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9575–9593, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Contrastive Domain Adaptation for Question Answering using Limited Text Corpora (Yue et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.754.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.754.mp4
Code
 yueeeeeeee/caqa
Data
HotpotQANatural QuestionsSQuADSearchQATriviaQA