Parameter-Efficient Abstractive Question Answering over Tables or Text

Vaishali Pal, Evangelos Kanoulas, Maarten Rijke


Abstract
A long-term ambition of information seeking QA systems is to reason over multi-modal contexts and generate natural answers to user queries. Today, memory intensive pre-trained language models are adapted to downstream tasks such as QA by fine-tuning the model on QA data in a specific modality like unstructured text or structured tables. To avoid training such memory-hungry models while utilizing a uniform architecture for each modality, parameter-efficient adapters add and train small task-specific bottle-neck layers between transformer layers. In this work, we study parameter-efficient abstractive QA in encoder-decoder models over structured tabular data and unstructured textual data using only 1.5% additional parameters for each modality. We also ablate over adapter layers in both encoder and decoder modules to study the efficiency-performance trade-off and demonstrate that reducing additional trainable parameters down to 0.7%-1.0% leads to comparable results. Our models out-perform current state-of-the-art models on tabular QA datasets such as Tablesum and FeTaQA, and achieve comparable performance on a textual QA dataset such as NarrativeQA using significantly less trainable parameters than fine-tuning.
Anthology ID:
2022.dialdoc-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Song Feng, Hui Wan, Caixia Yuan, Han Yu
Venue:
dialdoc
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
41–53
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.dialdoc-1.5
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.dialdoc-1.5
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vaishali Pal, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Maarten Rijke. 2022. Parameter-Efficient Abstractive Question Answering over Tables or Text. In Proceedings of the Second DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering, pages 41–53, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Parameter-Efficient Abstractive Question Answering over Tables or Text (Pal et al., dialdoc 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.dialdoc-1.5.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.dialdoc-1.5.mp4
Code
 kolk/pea-qa
Data
NarrativeQA