Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering

Todor Mihaylov, Peter Clark, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal


Abstract
We present a new kind of question answering dataset, OpenBookQA, modeled after open book exams for assessing human understanding of a subject. The open book that comes with our questions is a set of 1326 elementary level science facts. Roughly 6000 questions probe an understanding of these facts and their application to novel situations. This requires combining an open book fact (e.g., metals conduct electricity) with broad common knowledge (e.g., a suit of armor is made of metal) obtained from other sources. While existing QA datasets over documents or knowledge bases, being generally self-contained, focus on linguistic understanding, OpenBookQA probes a deeper understanding of both the topic—in the context of common knowledge—and the language it is expressed in. Human performance on OpenBookQA is close to 92%, but many state-of-the-art pre-trained QA methods perform surprisingly poorly, worse than several simple neural baselines we develop. Our oracle experiments designed to circumvent the knowledge retrieval bottleneck demonstrate the value of both the open book and additional facts. We leave it as a challenge to solve the retrieval problem in this multi-hop setting and to close the large gap to human performance.
Anthology ID:
D18-1260
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2381–2391
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1260
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1260
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Todor Mihaylov, Peter Clark, Tushar Khot, and Ashish Sabharwal. 2018. Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2381–2391, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering (Mihaylov et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1260.pdf
Attachment:
 D18-1260.Attachment.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/D18-1260.mp4
Code
 allenai/arc-solvers
Data
OpenBookQAConceptNetStoryClozeTQAWorldtree