@inproceedings{zhou-etal-2023-towards,
    title = "Towards End-to-End Open Conversational Machine Reading",
    author = "Zhou, Sizhe  and
      Ouyang, Siru  and
      Zhang, Zhuosheng  and
      Zhao, Hai",
    editor = "Vlachos, Andreas  and
      Augenstein, Isabelle",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023",
    month = may,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Dubrovnik, Croatia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2023.findings-eacl.154/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-eacl.154",
    pages = "2064--2076",
    abstract = "In open-retrieval conversational machine reading (OR-CMR) task, machines are required to do multi-turn question answering given dialogue history and a textual knowledge base. Existing works generally utilize two independent modules to approach this problem{'}s two successive sub-tasks: first with a hard-label decision making and second with a question generation aided by various entailment reasoning methods. Such usual cascaded modeling is vulnerable to error propagation and prevents the two sub-tasks from being consistently optimized. In this work, we instead model OR-CMR as a unified text-to-text task in a fully end-to-end style. Experiments on the ShARC and OR-ShARC dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed end-to-end framework on both sub-tasks by a large margin, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Further ablation studies support that our framework can generalize to different backbone models."
}