Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions

Xinyu Zhu, Cheng Yang, Bei Chen, Siheng Li, Jian-Guang Lou, Yujiu Yang


Abstract
Question answering plays a pivotal role in human daily life because it involves our acquisition of knowledge about the world. However, due to the dynamic and ever-changing nature of real-world facts, the answer can be completely different when the time constraint in the question changes. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering, while our experiments reveal that the aforementioned problems still pose a significant challenge to existing LLMs. This can be attributed to the LLMs’ inability to perform rigorous reasoning based on surface-level text semantics. To overcome this limitation, rather than requiring LLMs to directly answer the question, we propose a novel approach where we reframe the Question Answering task as Programming (QAaP). Concretely, by leveraging modern LLMs’ superior capability in understanding both natural language and programming language, we endeavor to harness LLMs to represent diversely expressed text as well-structured code and select the best matching answer from multiple candidates through programming. We evaluate our QAaP framework on several time-sensitive question answering datasets and achieve decent improvement, up to 14.5% over strong baselines.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.787
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:
12775–12790
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.787
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.787
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinyu Zhu, Cheng Yang, Bei Chen, Siheng Li, Jian-Guang Lou, and Yujiu Yang. 2023. Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12775–12790, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions (Zhu et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.787.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.787.mp4