QUEST: A Retrieval Dataset of Entity-Seeking Queries with Implicit Set Operations

Chaitanya Malaviya, Peter Shaw, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova


Abstract
Formulating selective information needs results in queries that implicitly specify set operations, such as intersection, union, and difference. For instance, one might search for “shorebirds that are not sandpipers” or “science-fiction films shot in England”. To study the ability of retrieval systems to meet such information needs, we construct QUEST, a dataset of 3357 natural language queries with implicit set operations, that map to a set of entities corresponding to Wikipedia documents. The dataset challenges models to match multiple constraints mentioned in queries with corresponding evidence in documents and correctly perform various set operations. The dataset is constructed semi-automatically using Wikipedia category names. Queries are automatically composed from individual categories, then paraphrased and further validated for naturalness and fluency by crowdworkers. Crowdworkers also assess the relevance of entities based on their documents and highlight attribution of query constraints to spans of document text. We analyze several modern retrieval systems, finding that they often struggle on such queries. Queries involving negation and conjunction are particularly challenging and systems are further challenged with combinations of these operations.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.784
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14032–14047
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.784
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.784
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chaitanya Malaviya, Peter Shaw, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. 2023. QUEST: A Retrieval Dataset of Entity-Seeking Queries with Implicit Set Operations. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14032–14047, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
QUEST: A Retrieval Dataset of Entity-Seeking Queries with Implicit Set Operations (Malaviya et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.784.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.784.mp4