Retrieval Data Augmentation Informed by Downstream Question Answering Performance

James Ferguson, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Pradeep Dasigi, Tushar Khot


Abstract
Training retrieval models to fetch contexts for Question Answering (QA) over large corpora requires labeling relevant passages in those corpora. Since obtaining exhaustive manual annotations of all relevant passages is not feasible, prior work uses text overlap heuristics to find passages that are likely to contain the answer, but this is not feasible when the task requires deeper reasoning and answers are not extractable spans (e.g.: multi-hop, discrete reasoning). We address this issue by identifying relevant passages based on whether they are useful for a trained QA model to arrive at the correct answers, and develop a search process guided by the QA model’s loss. Our experiments show that this approach enables identifying relevant context for unseen data greater than 90% of the time on the IIRC dataset and generalizes better to the end QA task than those trained on just the gold retrieval data on IIRC and QASC datasets.
Anthology ID:
2022.fever-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Rami Aly, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Oana Cocarascu, Zhijiang Guo, Arpit Mittal, Michael Schlichtkrull, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos
Venue:
FEVER
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–5
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.fever-1.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.fever-1.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
James Ferguson, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Pradeep Dasigi, and Tushar Khot. 2022. Retrieval Data Augmentation Informed by Downstream Question Answering Performance. In Proceedings of the Fifth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER), pages 1–5, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Retrieval Data Augmentation Informed by Downstream Question Answering Performance (Ferguson et al., FEVER 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.fever-1.1.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.fever-1.1.mp4
Data
IIRCQASCeQASC