Enhancing Temporal Sensitivity and Reasoning for Time-Sensitive Question Answering

Wanqi Yang, Yanda Li, Meng Fang, Ling Chen


Abstract
Time-Sensitive Question Answering (TSQA) demands the effective utilization of specific temporal contexts, encompassing multiple time-evolving facts, to address time-sensitive questions. This necessitates not only the parsing of temporal information within questions but also the identification and understanding of time-evolving facts to generate accurate answers. However, current large language models still have limited sensitivity to temporal information and their inadequate temporal reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that enhances temporal awareness and reasoning through Temporal Information-Aware Embedding and Granular Contrastive Reinforcement Learning. Experimental results on four TSQA datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing LLMs in TSQA tasks, marking a step forward in bridging the performance gap between machine and human temporal understanding and reasoning.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.848
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14495–14508
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2024.findings-emnlp.848/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.848
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wanqi Yang, Yanda Li, Meng Fang, and Ling Chen. 2024. Enhancing Temporal Sensitivity and Reasoning for Time-Sensitive Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 14495–14508, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Temporal Sensitivity and Reasoning for Time-Sensitive Question Answering (Yang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2024.findings-emnlp.848.pdf
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 2024.findings-emnlp.848.data.zip