(QA)2: Question Answering with Questionable Assumptions

Najoung Kim, Phu Mon Htut, Samuel R. Bowman, Jackson Petty


Abstract
Naturally occurring information-seeking questions often contain questionable assumptions—assumptions that are false or unverifiable. Questions containing questionable assumptions are challenging because they require a distinct answer strategy that deviates from typical answers for information-seeking questions. For instance, the question “When did Marie Curie discover Uranium?” cannot be answered as a typical “when” question without addressing the false assumption “Marie Curie discovered Uranium”. In this work, we propose (QA)2 (Question Answering with Questionable Assumptions), an open-domain evaluation dataset consisting of naturally occurring search engine queries that may or may not contain questionable assumptions. To be successful on (QA)2, systems must be able to detect questionable assumptions and also be able to produce adequate responses for both typical information-seeking questions and ones with questionable assumptions. Through human rater acceptability on end-to-end QA with (QA)2, we find that current models do struggle with handling questionable assumptions, leaving substantial headroom for progress.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.472
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8466–8487
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.472
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.472
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Najoung Kim, Phu Mon Htut, Samuel R. Bowman, and Jackson Petty. 2023. (QA)2: Question Answering with Questionable Assumptions. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8466–8487, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
(QA)2: Question Answering with Questionable Assumptions (Kim et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-2024-clasp/2023.acl-long.472.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-2024-clasp/2023.acl-long.472.mp4