QA-Align: Representing Cross-Text Content Overlap by Aligning Question-Answer Propositions

Daniela Brook Weiss, Paul Roit, Ayal Klein, Ori Ernst, Ido Dagan


Abstract
Multi-text applications, such as multi-document summarization, are typically required to model redundancies across related texts. Current methods confronting consolidation struggle to fuse overlapping information. In order to explicitly represent content overlap, we propose to align predicate-argument relations across texts, providing a potential scaffold for information consolidation. We go beyond clustering coreferring mentions, and instead model overlap with respect to redundancy at a propositional level, rather than merely detecting shared referents. Our setting exploits QA-SRL, utilizing question-answer pairs to capture predicate-argument relations, facilitating laymen annotation of cross-text alignments. We employ crowd-workers for constructing a dataset of QA-based alignments, and present a baseline QA alignment model trained over our dataset. Analyses show that our new task is semantically challenging, capturing content overlap beyond lexical similarity and complements cross-document coreference with proposition-level links, offering potential use for downstream tasks.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.778
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:
9879–9894
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.778
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.778
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Daniela Brook Weiss, Paul Roit, Ayal Klein, Ori Ernst, and Ido Dagan. 2021. QA-Align: Representing Cross-Text Content Overlap by Aligning Question-Answer Propositions. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9879–9894, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
QA-Align: Representing Cross-Text Content Overlap by Aligning Question-Answer Propositions (Brook Weiss et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.778.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.778.mp4
Code
 danielabweiss/qa-align
Data
ECB+QA-SRL