When Do Decompositions Help for Machine Reading?

Kangda Wei, Dawn Lawrie, Benjamin Van Durme, Yunmo Chen, Orion Weller


Abstract
Answering complex questions often requires multi-step reasoning in order to obtain the final answer. Most research into decompositions of complex questions involves open-domain systems, which have shown success in using these decompositions for improved retrieval. In the machine reading setting, however, work to understand when decompositions are helpful is understudied. We conduct experiments on decompositions in machine reading to unify recent work in this space, using a range of models and datasets. We find that decompositions can be helpful in zero or limited-data settings, giving several points of improvement in exact match. However, we also show that when models are given access to around a few hundred or more examples, decompositions are not helpful (and can actually be detrimental). Thus, our analysis implies that models can learn decompositions implicitly even with limited data.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.219
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3599–3606
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.219
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.219
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kangda Wei, Dawn Lawrie, Benjamin Van Durme, Yunmo Chen, and Orion Weller. 2023. When Do Decompositions Help for Machine Reading?. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3599–3606, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
When Do Decompositions Help for Machine Reading? (Wei et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.219.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.219.mp4