TWEETQA: A Social Media Focused Question Answering Dataset

Wenhan Xiong, Jiawei Wu, Hong Wang, Vivek Kulkarni, Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Xiaoxiao Guo, William Yang Wang


Abstract
With social media becoming increasingly popular on which lots of news and real-time events are reported, developing automated question answering systems is critical to the effective-ness of many applications that rely on real-time knowledge. While previous datasets have concentrated on question answering (QA) for formal text like news and Wikipedia, we present the first large-scale dataset for QA over social media data. To ensure that the tweets we collected are useful, we only gather tweets used by journalists to write news articles. We then ask human annotators to write questions and answers upon these tweets. Unlike otherQA datasets like SQuAD in which the answers are extractive, we allow the answers to be abstractive. We show that two recently proposed neural models that perform well on formal texts are limited in their performance when applied to our dataset. In addition, even the fine-tuned BERT model is still lagging behind human performance with a large margin. Our results thus point to the need of improved QA systems targeting social media text.
Anthology ID:
P19-1496
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:
5020–5031
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1496
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1496
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenhan Xiong, Jiawei Wu, Hong Wang, Vivek Kulkarni, Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Xiaoxiao Guo, and William Yang Wang. 2019. TWEETQA: A Social Media Focused Question Answering Dataset. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5020–5031, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TWEETQA: A Social Media Focused Question Answering Dataset (Xiong et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1496.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1496.mp4
Data
TweetQAMS MARCONewsQASQuAD