How Many Answers Should I Give? An Empirical Study of Multi-Answer Reading Comprehension

Chen Zhang, Jiuheng Lin, Xiao Liu, Yuxuan Lai, Yansong Feng, Dongyan Zhao


Abstract
The multi-answer phenomenon, where a question may have multiple answers scattered in the document, can be well handled by humans but is challenging enough for machine reading comprehension (MRC) systems. Despite recent progress in multi-answer MRC, there lacks a systematic analysis of how this phenomenon arises and how to better address it. In this work, we design a taxonomy to categorize commonly-seen multi-answer MRC instances, with which we inspect three multi-answer datasets and analyze where the multi-answer challenge comes from. We further analyze how well different paradigms of current multi-answer MRC models deal with different types of multi-answer instances. We find that some paradigms capture well the key information in the questions while others better model the relation between questions and contexts. We thus explore strategies to make the best of the strengths of different paradigms. Experiments show that generation models can be a promising platform to incorporate different paradigms. Our annotations and code are released for further research.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.359
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5811–5827
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.359
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.359
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chen Zhang, Jiuheng Lin, Xiao Liu, Yuxuan Lai, Yansong Feng, and Dongyan Zhao. 2023. How Many Answers Should I Give? An Empirical Study of Multi-Answer Reading Comprehension. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 5811–5827, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How Many Answers Should I Give? An Empirical Study of Multi-Answer Reading Comprehension (Zhang et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.359.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.359.mp4