Recently proposed long-form question answering (QA) systems, supported by large language models (LLMs), have shown promising capabilities. Yet, attributing and verifying their generated abstractive answers can be difficult, and automatically evaluating their accuracy remains an ongoing challenge.In this work, we introduce a new QA task for answering multi-answer questions by summarizing multiple diverse sources in a semi-extractive fashion. Specifically, Semi-extractive Multi-source QA (SEMQA) requires models to output a comprehensive answer, while mixing factual quoted spans—copied verbatim from given input sources—and non-factual free-text connectors that glue these spans together into a single cohesive passage. This setting bridges the gap between the outputs of well-grounded but constrained extractive QA systems and more fluent but harder to attribute fully abstractive answers. Particularly, it enables a new mode for language models that leverages their advanced language generation capabilities, while also producing fine in-line attributions by-design that are easy to verify, interpret, and evaluate. To study this task, we create the first dataset of this kind, QuoteSum, with human-written semi-extractive answers to natural and generated questions, and define text-based evaluation metrics. Experimenting with several LLMs in various settings, we find this task to be surprisingly challenging, demonstrating the importance of QuoteSum for developing and studying such consolidation capabilities.

Pre-trained vision and language models have demonstrated state-of-the-art capabilities over existing tasks involving images and texts, including visual question answering. However, it remains unclear whether these models possess the capability to answer questions that are not only querying visual content but knowledge-intensive and information-seeking. In this study, we introduce InfoSeek, a visual question answering dataset tailored for information-seeking questions that cannot be answered with only common sense knowledge. Using InfoSeek, we analyze various pre-trained visual question answering models and gain insights into their characteristics. Our findings reveal that state-of-the-art pre-trained multi-modal models (e.g., PaLI-X, BLIP2, InstructBLIP) face challenges in answering visual information-seeking questions, but fine-tuning on the InfoSeek dataset elicits models to use fine-grained knowledge that was learned during pre-training. Furthermore, we show that accurate visual entity recognition can be used to improve performance on InfoSeek by retrieving relevant documents, showing a significant space for improvement.

We describe a Question Answering (QA) dataset that contains complex questions with conditional answers, i.e. the answers are only applicable when certain conditions apply. We call this dataset ConditionalQA. In addition to conditional answers, the dataset also features:(1) long context documents with information that is related in logically complex ways;(2) multi-hop questions that require compositional logical reasoning;(3) a combination of extractive questions, yes/no questions, questions with multiple answers, and not-answerable questions;(4) questions asked without knowing the answers. We show that ConditionalQA is challenging for many of the existing QA models, especially in selecting answer conditions. We believe that this dataset will motivate further research in answering complex questions over long documents.

Existing work shows the benefits of integrating KBs with textual evidence for QA only on questions that are answerable by KBs alone (Sun et al., 2019). In contrast, real world QA systems often have to deal with questions that might not be directly answerable by KBs. Here, we investigate the effect of integrating background knowledge from KBs for the Natural Questions (NQ) task. We create a subset of the NQ data, Factual Questions (FQ), where the questions have evidence in the KB in the form of paths that link question entities to answer entities but still must be answered using text, to facilitate further research into KB integration methods. We propose and analyze a simple, model-agnostic approach for incorporating KB paths into text-based QA systems and establish a strong upper bound on FQ for our method using an oracle retriever. We show that several variants of Personalized PageRank based fact retrievers lead to a low recall of answer entities and consequently fail to improve QA performance. Our results suggest that fact retrieval is a bottleneck for integrating KBs into real world QA datasets

Past research has demonstrated that large neural language models (LMs) encode surprising amounts of factual information: however, augmenting or modifying this information requires modifying a corpus and retraining, which is computationally expensive. To address this problem, we develop a neural LM that includes an interpretable neuro-symbolic KB in the form of a “fact memory”. Each element of the fact memory is formed from a triple of vectors, where each vector corresponds to a KB entity or relation. Our LM improves performance on knowledge-intensive question-answering tasks, sometimes dramatically, including a 27 point increase in one setting of WebQuestionsSP over a state-of-the-art open-book model, despite using 5% of the parameters. Most interestingly, we demonstrate that the model can be modified, without any re-training, by updating the fact memory.

Current commonsense reasoning research focuses on developing models that use commonsense knowledge to answer multiple-choice questions. However, systems designed to answer multiple-choice questions may not be useful in applications that do not provide a small list of candidate answers to choose from. As a step towards making commonsense reasoning research more realistic, we propose to study open-ended commonsense reasoning (OpenCSR) — the task of answering a commonsense question without any pre-defined choices — using as a resource only a corpus of commonsense facts written in natural language. OpenCSR is challenging due to a large decision space, and because many questions require implicit multi-hop reasoning. As an approach to OpenCSR, we propose DrFact, an efficient Differentiable model for multi-hop Reasoning over knowledge Facts. To evaluate OpenCSR methods, we adapt several popular commonsense reasoning benchmarks, and collect multiple new answers for each test question via crowd-sourcing. Experiments show that DrFact outperforms strong baseline methods by a large margin.

We consider open-domain question answering (QA) where answers are drawn from either a corpus, a knowledge base (KB), or a combination of both of these. We focus on a setting in which a corpus is supplemented with a large but incomplete KB, and on questions that require non-trivial (e.g., “multi-hop”) reasoning. We describe PullNet, an integrated framework for (1) learning what to retrieve and (2) reasoning with this heterogeneous information to find the best answer. PullNet uses an iterative process to construct a question-specific subgraph that contains information relevant to the question. In each iteration, a graph convolutional network (graph CNN) is used to identify subgraph nodes that should be expanded using retrieval (or “pull”) operations on the corpus and/or KB. After the subgraph is complete, another graph CNN is used to extract the answer from the subgraph. This retrieve-and-reason process allows us to answer multi-hop questions using large KBs and corpora. PullNet is weakly supervised, requiring question-answer pairs but not gold inference paths. Experimentally PullNet improves over the prior state-of-the art, and in the setting where a corpus is used with incomplete KB these improvements are often dramatic. PullNet is also often superior to prior systems in a KB-only setting or a text-only setting.

Open Domain Question Answering (QA) is evolving from complex pipelined systems to end-to-end deep neural networks. Specialized neural models have been developed for extracting answers from either text alone or Knowledge Bases (KBs) alone. In this paper we look at a more practical setting, namely QA over the combination of a KB and entity-linked text, which is appropriate when an incomplete KB is available with a large text corpus. Building on recent advances in graph representation learning we propose a novel model, GRAFT-Net, for extracting answers from a question-specific subgraph containing text and KB entities and relations. We construct a suite of benchmark tasks for this problem, varying the difficulty of questions, the amount of training data, and KB completeness. We show that GRAFT-Net is competitive with the state-of-the-art when tested using either KBs or text alone, and vastly outperforms existing methods in the combined setting.