Feeding What You Need by Understanding What You Learned

Xiaoqiang Wang, Bang Liu, Fangli Xu, Bo Long, Siliang Tang, Lingfei Wu


Abstract
Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) reveals the ability to understand a given text passage and answer questions based on it. Existing research works in MRC rely heavily on large-size models and corpus to improve the performance evaluated by metrics such as Exact Match (EM) and F1. However, such a paradigm lacks sufficient interpretation to model capability and can not efficiently train a model with a large corpus. In this paper, we argue that a deep understanding of model capabilities and data properties can help us feed a model with appropriate training data based on its learning status. Specifically, we design an MRC capability assessment framework that assesses model capabilities in an explainable and multi-dimensional manner. Based on it, we further uncover and disentangle the connections between various data properties and model performance. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed MRC capability assessment framework, we incorporate it into a curriculum learning pipeline and devise a Capability Boundary Breakthrough Curriculum (CBBC) strategy, which performs a model capability-based training to maximize the data value and improve training efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves performance, achieving up to an 11.22% / 8.71% improvement of EM / F1 on MRC tasks.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.403
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5858–5874
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.403
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.403
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoqiang Wang, Bang Liu, Fangli Xu, Bo Long, Siliang Tang, and Lingfei Wu. 2022. Feeding What You Need by Understanding What You Learned. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5858–5874, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Feeding What You Need by Understanding What You Learned (Wang et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2022.acl-long.403.pdf
Software:
 2022.acl-long.403.software.zip
Data
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