Ao Wu


2022

pdf bib
Clues Before Answers: Generation-Enhanced Multiple-Choice QA
Zixian Huang | Ao Wu | Jiaying Zhou | Yu Gu | Yue Zhao | Gong Cheng
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

A trending paradigm for multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is using a text-to-text framework. By unifying data in different tasks into a single text-to-text format, it trains a generative encoder-decoder model which is both powerful and universal. However, a side effect of twisting a generation target to fit the classification nature of MCQA is the under-utilization of the decoder and the knowledge that can be decoded. To exploit the generation capability and underlying knowledge of a pre-trained encoder-decoder model, in this paper, we propose a generation-enhanced MCQA model named GenMC. It generates a clue from the question and then leverages the clue to enhance a reader for MCQA. It outperforms text-to-text models on multiple MCQA datasets.

2021

pdf bib
When Retriever-Reader Meets Scenario-Based Multiple-Choice Questions
ZiXian Huang | Ao Wu | Yulin Shen | Gong Cheng | Yuzhong Qu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Scenario-based question answering (SQA) requires retrieving and reading paragraphs from a large corpus to answer a question which is contextualized by a long scenario description. Since a scenario contains both keyphrases for retrieval and much noise, retrieval for SQA is extremely difficult. Moreover, it can hardly be supervised due to the lack of relevance labels of paragraphs for SQA. To meet the challenge, in this paper we propose a joint retriever-reader model called JEEVES where the retriever is implicitly supervised only using QA labels via a novel word weighting mechanism. JEEVES significantly outperforms a variety of strong baselines on multiple-choice questions in three SQA datasets.