Can Question Rewriting Help Conversational Question Answering?

Etsuko Ishii, Yan Xu, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Bryan Wilie


Abstract
Question rewriting (QR) is a subtask of conversational question answering (CQA) aiming to ease the challenges of understanding dependencies among dialogue history by reformulating questions in a self-contained form. Despite seeming plausible, little evidence is available to justify QR as a mitigation method for CQA. To verify the effectiveness of QR in CQA, we investigate a reinforcement learning approach that integrates QR and CQA tasks and does not require corresponding QR datasets for targeted CQA.We find, however, that the RL method is on par with the end-to-end baseline. We provide an analysis of the failure and describe the difficulty of exploiting QR for CQA.
Anthology ID:
2022.insights-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Shabnam Tafreshi, João Sedoc, Anna Rogers, Aleksandr Drozd, Anna Rumshisky, Arjun Akula
Venue:
insights
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
94–99
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.insights-1.13
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.insights-1.13
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Etsuko Ishii, Yan Xu, Samuel Cahyawijaya, and Bryan Wilie. 2022. Can Question Rewriting Help Conversational Question Answering?. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP, pages 94–99, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can Question Rewriting Help Conversational Question Answering? (Ishii et al., insights 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.insights-1.13.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.insights-1.13.mp4
Code
 hltchkust/cqr4cqa
Data
CANARDCoQAQReCCQuAC