@inproceedings{gabburo-etal-2024-measuring,
title = "Measuring Retrieval Complexity in Question Answering Systems",
author = "Gabburo, Matteo and
Jedema, Nicolaas and
Garg, Siddhant and
Ribeiro, Leonardo and
Moschitti, Alessandro",
editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei and
Martins, Andre and
Srikumar, Vivek",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024",
month = aug,
year = "2024",
address = "Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.872",
pages = "14636--14650",
abstract = "In this paper, we investigate which questions are challenging for retrieval-based Question Answering (QA). We (i) propose retrieval complexity (RC), a novel metric conditioned on the completeness of retrieved documents, which measures the difficulty of answering questions, and (ii) propose an unsupervised pipeline to measure RC given an arbitrary retrieval system.Our proposed pipeline measures RC more accurately than alternative estimators, including LLMs, on six challenging QA benchmarks. Further investigation reveals that RC scores strongly correlate with both QA performance and expert judgment across five of the six studied benchmarks, indicating that RC is an effective measure of question difficulty.Subsequent categorization of high-RC questions shows that they span a broad set of question shapes, including multi-hop, compositional, and temporal QA, indicating that RC scores can categorize a new subset of complex questions. Our system can also have a major impact on retrieval-based systems by helping to identify more challenging questions on existing datasets.",
}
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<abstract>In this paper, we investigate which questions are challenging for retrieval-based Question Answering (QA). We (i) propose retrieval complexity (RC), a novel metric conditioned on the completeness of retrieved documents, which measures the difficulty of answering questions, and (ii) propose an unsupervised pipeline to measure RC given an arbitrary retrieval system.Our proposed pipeline measures RC more accurately than alternative estimators, including LLMs, on six challenging QA benchmarks. Further investigation reveals that RC scores strongly correlate with both QA performance and expert judgment across five of the six studied benchmarks, indicating that RC is an effective measure of question difficulty.Subsequent categorization of high-RC questions shows that they span a broad set of question shapes, including multi-hop, compositional, and temporal QA, indicating that RC scores can categorize a new subset of complex questions. Our system can also have a major impact on retrieval-based systems by helping to identify more challenging questions on existing datasets.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Measuring Retrieval Complexity in Question Answering Systems
%A Gabburo, Matteo
%A Jedema, Nicolaas
%A Garg, Siddhant
%A Ribeiro, Leonardo
%A Moschitti, Alessandro
%Y Ku, Lun-Wei
%Y Martins, Andre
%Y Srikumar, Vivek
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
%D 2024
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
%F gabburo-etal-2024-measuring
%X In this paper, we investigate which questions are challenging for retrieval-based Question Answering (QA). We (i) propose retrieval complexity (RC), a novel metric conditioned on the completeness of retrieved documents, which measures the difficulty of answering questions, and (ii) propose an unsupervised pipeline to measure RC given an arbitrary retrieval system.Our proposed pipeline measures RC more accurately than alternative estimators, including LLMs, on six challenging QA benchmarks. Further investigation reveals that RC scores strongly correlate with both QA performance and expert judgment across five of the six studied benchmarks, indicating that RC is an effective measure of question difficulty.Subsequent categorization of high-RC questions shows that they span a broad set of question shapes, including multi-hop, compositional, and temporal QA, indicating that RC scores can categorize a new subset of complex questions. Our system can also have a major impact on retrieval-based systems by helping to identify more challenging questions on existing datasets.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.872
%P 14636-14650
Markdown (Informal)
[Measuring Retrieval Complexity in Question Answering Systems](https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.872) (Gabburo et al., Findings 2024)
ACL
- Matteo Gabburo, Nicolaas Jedema, Siddhant Garg, Leonardo Ribeiro, and Alessandro Moschitti. 2024. Measuring Retrieval Complexity in Question Answering Systems. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 14636–14650, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.