Natural Questions: A Benchmark for Question Answering Research

Tom Kwiatkowski, Jennimaria Palomaki, Olivia Redfield, Michael Collins, Ankur Parikh, Chris Alberti, Danielle Epstein, Illia Polosukhin, Jacob Devlin, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, Llion Jones, Matthew Kelcey, Ming-Wei Chang, Andrew M. Dai, Jakob Uszkoreit, Quoc Le, Slav Petrov


Abstract
We present the Natural Questions corpus, a question answering data set. Questions consist of real anonymized, aggregated queries issued to the Google search engine. An annotator is presented with a question along with a Wikipedia page from the top 5 search results, and annotates a long answer (typically a paragraph) and a short answer (one or more entities) if present on the page, or marks null if no long/short answer is present. The public release consists of 307,373 training examples with single annotations; 7,830 examples with 5-way annotations for development data; and a further 7,842 examples with 5-way annotated sequestered as test data. We present experiments validating quality of the data. We also describe analysis of 25-way annotations on 302 examples, giving insights into human variability on the annotation task. We introduce robust metrics for the purposes of evaluating question answering systems; demonstrate high human upper bounds on these metrics; and establish baseline results using competitive methods drawn from related literature.
Anthology ID:
Q19-1026
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 7
Month:
Year:
2019
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Lillian Lee, Mark Johnson, Brian Roark, Ani Nenkova
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
452–466
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q19-1026
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00276
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tom Kwiatkowski, Jennimaria Palomaki, Olivia Redfield, Michael Collins, Ankur Parikh, Chris Alberti, Danielle Epstein, Illia Polosukhin, Jacob Devlin, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, Llion Jones, Matthew Kelcey, Ming-Wei Chang, Andrew M. Dai, Jakob Uszkoreit, Quoc Le, and Slav Petrov. 2019. Natural Questions: A Benchmark for Question Answering Research. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 7:452–466.
Cite (Informal):
Natural Questions: A Benchmark for Question Answering Research (Kwiatkowski et al., TACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/Q19-1026.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/Q19-1026.mp4
Data
Natural QuestionsCoQAHotpotQAMS MARCONarrativeQAQuACSQuADTriviaQAWikiQA