A Simple Approach to Jointly Rank Passages and Select Relevant Sentences in the OBQA Context

Man Luo, Shuguang Chen, Chitta Baral


Abstract
In the open book question answering (OBQA) task, selecting the relevant passages and sentences from distracting information is crucial to reason the answer to a question. HotpotQA dataset is designed to teach and evaluate systems to do both passage ranking and sentence selection. Many existing frameworks use separate models to select relevant passages and sentences respectively. Such systems not only have high complexity in terms of the parameters of models but also fail to take the advantage of training these two tasks together since one task can be beneficial for the other one. In this work, we present a simple yet effective framework to address these limitations by jointly ranking passages and selecting sentences. Furthermore, we propose consistency and similarity constraints to promote the correlation and interaction between passage ranking and sentence selection. The experiments demonstrate that our framework can achieve competitive results with previous systems and outperform the baseline by 28% in terms of exact matching of relevant sentences on the HotpotQA dataset.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-srw.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Student Research Workshop
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Hybrid: Seattle, Washington + Online
Editors:
Daphne Ippolito, Liunian Harold Li, Maria Leonor Pacheco, Danqi Chen, Nianwen Xue
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
181–187
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-srw.23
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-srw.23
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Man Luo, Shuguang Chen, and Chitta Baral. 2022. A Simple Approach to Jointly Rank Passages and Select Relevant Sentences in the OBQA Context. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Student Research Workshop, pages 181–187, Hybrid: Seattle, Washington + Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Simple Approach to Jointly Rank Passages and Select Relevant Sentences in the OBQA Context (Luo et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-srw.23.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-srw.23.mp4
Data
HotpotQAOpenBookQA