Finding Generalizable Evidence by Learning to Convince Q&A Models

Ethan Perez, Siddharth Karamcheti, Rob Fergus, Jason Weston, Douwe Kiela, Kyunghyun Cho


Abstract
We propose a system that finds the strongest supporting evidence for a given answer to a question, using passage-based question-answering (QA) as a testbed. We train evidence agents to select the passage sentences that most convince a pretrained QA model of a given answer, if the QA model received those sentences instead of the full passage. Rather than finding evidence that convinces one model alone, we find that agents select evidence that generalizes; agent-chosen evidence increases the plausibility of the supported answer, as judged by other QA models and humans. Given its general nature, this approach improves QA in a robust manner: using agent-selected evidence (i) humans can correctly answer questions with only ~20% of the full passage and (ii) QA models can generalize to longer passages and harder questions.
Anthology ID:
D19-1244
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2402–2411
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1244
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1244
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ethan Perez, Siddharth Karamcheti, Rob Fergus, Jason Weston, Douwe Kiela, and Kyunghyun Cho. 2019. Finding Generalizable Evidence by Learning to Convince Q&A Models. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2402–2411, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Finding Generalizable Evidence by Learning to Convince Q&A Models (Perez et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1244.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1244.Attachment.zip