Numerical reasoning in machine reading comprehension tasks: are we there yet?

Hadeel Al-Negheimish, Pranava Madhyastha, Alessandra Russo


Abstract
Numerical reasoning based machine reading comprehension is a task that involves reading comprehension along with using arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, sorting and counting. The DROP benchmark (Dua et al., 2019) is a recent dataset that has inspired the design of NLP models aimed at solving this task. The current standings of these models in the DROP leaderboard, over standard metrics, suggests that the models have achieved near-human performance. However, does this mean that these models have learned to reason? In this paper, we present a controlled study on some of the top-performing model architectures for the task of numerical reasoning. Our observations suggest that the standard metrics are incapable of measuring progress towards such tasks.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.759
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9643–9649
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.759
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.759
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hadeel Al-Negheimish, Pranava Madhyastha, and Alessandra Russo. 2021. Numerical reasoning in machine reading comprehension tasks: are we there yet?. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9643–9649, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Numerical reasoning in machine reading comprehension tasks: are we there yet? (Al-Negheimish et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/2021.emnlp-main.759.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/2021.emnlp-main.759.mp4
Data
DROP