Abstract
Question generation is a widely used data augmentation approach with extensive applications, and extracting qualified candidate answers from context passages is a critical step for most question generation systems. However, existing methods for candidate answer extraction are reliant on linguistic rules or annotated data that face the partial annotation issue and challenges in generalization. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel unsupervised candidate answer extraction approach that leverages the inherent structure of context passages through a Differentiable Masker-Reconstructor (DMR) Model with the enforcement of self-consistency for picking up salient information tokens. We curated two datasets with exhaustively-annotated answers and benchmark a comprehensive set of supervised and unsupervised candidate answer extraction methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the DMR model by showing its performance is superior among unsupervised methods and comparable to supervised methods.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.findings-emnlp.379
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5712–5723
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.379
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.379
- Cite (ACL):
- Zhuoer Wang, Yicheng Wang, Ziwei Zhu, and James Caverlee. 2023. Unsupervised Candidate Answer Extraction through Differentiable Masker-Reconstructor Model. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 5712–5723, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Unsupervised Candidate Answer Extraction through Differentiable Masker-Reconstructor Model (Wang et al., Findings 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2023.findings-emnlp.379.pdf