ELI5: Long Form Question Answering

Angela Fan, Yacine Jernite, Ethan Perez, David Grangier, Jason Weston, Michael Auli


Abstract
We introduce the first large-scale corpus for long form question answering, a task requiring elaborate and in-depth answers to open-ended questions. The dataset comprises 270K threads from the Reddit forum “Explain Like I’m Five” (ELI5) where an online community provides answers to questions which are comprehensible by five year olds. Compared to existing datasets, ELI5 comprises diverse questions requiring multi-sentence answers. We provide a large set of web documents to help answer the question. Automatic and human evaluations show that an abstractive model trained with a multi-task objective outperforms conventional Seq2Seq, language modeling, as well as a strong extractive baseline. However, our best model is still far from human performance since raters prefer gold responses in over 86% of cases, leaving ample opportunity for future improvement.
Anthology ID:
P19-1346
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3558–3567
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1346
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1346
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Angela Fan, Yacine Jernite, Ethan Perez, David Grangier, Jason Weston, and Michael Auli. 2019. ELI5: Long Form Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3558–3567, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ELI5: Long Form Question Answering (Fan et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1346.pdf
Supplementary:
 P19-1346.Supplementary.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1346.mp4
Code
 facebookresearch/ELI5 +  additional community code
Data
ELI5