What do we expect from Multiple-choice QA Systems?

Krunal Shah, Nitish Gupta, Dan Roth


Abstract
The recent success of machine learning systems on various QA datasets could be interpreted as a significant improvement in models’ language understanding abilities. However, using various perturbations, multiple recent works have shown that good performance on a dataset might not indicate performance that correlates well with human’s expectations from models that “understand” language. In this work we consider a top performing model on several Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) datasets, and evaluate it against a set of expectations one might have from such a model, using a series of zero-information perturbations of the model’s inputs. Our results show that the model clearly falls short of our expectations, and motivates a modified training approach that forces the model to better attend to the inputs. We show that the new training paradigm leads to a model that performs on par with the original model while better satisfying our expectations.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.317
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3547–3553
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.317
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.317
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Krunal Shah, Nitish Gupta, and Dan Roth. 2020. What do we expect from Multiple-choice QA Systems?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 3547–3553, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What do we expect from Multiple-choice QA Systems? (Shah et al., Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2020.findings-emnlp.317.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38940132
Data
QASC