MetaQA: Combining Expert Agents for Multi-Skill Question Answering

Haritz Puerto, Gözde Şahin, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
The recent explosion of question-answering (QA) datasets and models has increased the interest in the generalization of models across multiple domains and formats by either training on multiple datasets or combining multiple models. Despite the promising results of multi-dataset models, some domains or QA formats may require specific architectures, and thus the adaptability of these models might be limited. In addition, current approaches for combining models disregard cues such as question-answer compatibility. In this work, we propose to combine expert agents with a novel, flexible, and training-efficient architecture that considers questions, answer predictions, and answer-prediction confidence scores to select the best answer among a list of answer predictions. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we show that our model i) creates a collaboration between agents that outperforms previous multi-agent and multi-dataset approaches, ii) is highly data-efficient to train, and iii) can be adapted to any QA format. We release our code and a dataset of answer predictions from expert agents for 16 QA datasets to foster future research of multi-agent systems.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.259
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3566–3580
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.259
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.259
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haritz Puerto, Gözde Şahin, and Iryna Gurevych. 2023. MetaQA: Combining Expert Agents for Multi-Skill Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3566–3580, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MetaQA: Combining Expert Agents for Multi-Skill Question Answering (Puerto et al., EACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.259.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.259.mp4