Yulin Shen


2021

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When Retriever-Reader Meets Scenario-Based Multiple-Choice Questions
ZiXian Huang | Ao Wu | Yulin Shen | Gong Cheng | Yuzhong Qu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Scenario-based question answering (SQA) requires retrieving and reading paragraphs from a large corpus to answer a question which is contextualized by a long scenario description. Since a scenario contains both keyphrases for retrieval and much noise, retrieval for SQA is extremely difficult. Moreover, it can hardly be supervised due to the lack of relevance labels of paragraphs for SQA. To meet the challenge, in this paper we propose a joint retriever-reader model called JEEVES where the retriever is implicitly supervised only using QA labels via a novel word weighting mechanism. JEEVES significantly outperforms a variety of strong baselines on multiple-choice questions in three SQA datasets.

2019

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GeoSQA: A Benchmark for Scenario-based Question Answering in the Geography Domain at High School Level
Zixian Huang | Yulin Shen | Xiao Li | Yu’ang Wei | Gong Cheng | Lin Zhou | Xinyu Dai | Yuzhong Qu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Scenario-based question answering (SQA) has attracted increasing research attention. It typically requires retrieving and integrating knowledge from multiple sources, and applying general knowledge to a specific case described by a scenario. SQA widely exists in the medical, geography, and legal domains—both in practice and in the exams. In this paper, we introduce the GeoSQA dataset. It consists of 1,981 scenarios and 4,110 multiple-choice questions in the geography domain at high school level, where diagrams (e.g., maps, charts) have been manually annotated with natural language descriptions to benefit NLP research. Benchmark results on a variety of state-of-the-art methods for question answering, textual entailment, and reading comprehension demonstrate the unique challenges presented by SQA for future research.