QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering

Haochen Shi, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Baixuan Xu, Wenxuan Ding, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song


Abstract
Zero-shot commonsense Question-Answering (QA) requires models to reason about general situations beyond specific benchmarks. State-of-the-art approaches fine-tune language models on QA pairs constructed from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) to equip the models with more commonsense knowledge in a QA context. However, current QA synthesis protocols may introduce noise from the CSKBs and generate ungrammatical questions and false negative options, which impede the model’s ability to generalize. To address these issues, we propose QADYNAMICS, a training dynamics-driven framework for QA diagnostics and refinement. Our approach analyzes the training dynamics of each QA pair at both the question level and option level, discarding machine-detectable artifacts by removing uninformative QA pairs and mislabeled or false-negative options. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms all baselines while using only 33% of the synthetic data, even including LLMs such as ChatGPT. Moreover, expert evaluations confirm that our framework significantly improves the quality of QA synthesis. Our code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/QaDynamics.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.1023
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15329–15341
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1023
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.1023
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haochen Shi, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Baixuan Xu, Wenxuan Ding, Xin Liu, and Yangqiu Song. 2023. QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 15329–15341, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering (Shi et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1023.pdf