Learning What is Essential in Questions

Daniel Khashabi, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, Dan Roth


Abstract
Question answering (QA) systems are easily distracted by irrelevant or redundant words in questions, especially when faced with long or multi-sentence questions in difficult domains. This paper introduces and studies the notion of essential question terms with the goal of improving such QA solvers. We illustrate the importance of essential question terms by showing that humans’ ability to answer questions drops significantly when essential terms are eliminated from questions. We then develop a classifier that reliably (90% mean average precision) identifies and ranks essential terms in questions. Finally, we use the classifier to demonstrate that the notion of question term essentiality allows state-of-the-art QA solver for elementary-level science questions to make better and more informed decisions,improving performance by up to 5%.We also introduce a new dataset of over 2,200 crowd-sourced essential terms annotated science questions.
Anthology ID:
K17-1010
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017)
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Roger Levy, Lucia Specia
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
80–89
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K17-1010
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K17-1010
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Daniel Khashabi, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, and Dan Roth. 2017. Learning What is Essential in Questions. In Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017), pages 80–89, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning What is Essential in Questions (Khashabi et al., CoNLL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/K17-1010.pdf
Code
 allenai/essential-terms