Abstract
Unlike the Open Domain Question Answering (ODQA) setting, the conversational (ODConvQA) domain has received limited attention when it comes to reevaluating baselines for both efficiency and effectiveness. In this paper, we study the State-of-the-Art (SotA) Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) retriever and Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) reader pipeline, and show that it significantly underperforms when applied to ODConvQA tasks due to various limitations. We then propose and evaluate strong yet simple and efficient baselines, by introducing a fast reranking component between the retriever and the reader, and by performing targeted finetuning steps. Experiments on two ODConvQA tasks, namely TopiOCQA and OR-QuAC, show that our method improves the SotA results, while reducing reader’s latency by 60%. Finally, we provide new and valuable insights into the development of challenging baselines that serve as a reference for future, more intricate approaches, including those that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs).- Anthology ID:
- 2023.findings-emnlp.417
- 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:
- 6305–6314
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.417
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.417
- Cite (ACL):
- Andrei Coman, Gianni Barlacchi, and Adrià de Gispert. 2023. Strong and Efficient Baselines for Open Domain Conversational Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 6305–6314, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Strong and Efficient Baselines for Open Domain Conversational Question Answering (Coman et al., Findings 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2023.findings-emnlp.417.pdf