ControversialQA: Exploring Controversy in Question Answering

Zhen Wang, Peide Zhu, Jie Yang


Abstract
Controversy is widespread online. Previous studies mainly define controversy based on vague assumptions of its relation to sentiment such as hate speech and offensive words. This paper introduces the first question-answering dataset that defines content controversy by user perception, i.e., votes from plenty of users. It contains nearly 10K questions, and each question has a best answer and a most controversial answer. Experimental results reveal that controversy detection in question answering is essential and challenging, and there is no strong correlation between controversy and sentiment tasks. We also show that controversial answers and most acceptable answers cannot be distinguished by retrieval-based QA models, which may cause controversy issues. With these insights, we believe ControversialQA can inspire future research on controversy in QA systems.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.351
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
3962–3966
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.351
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhen Wang, Peide Zhu, and Jie Yang. 2024. ControversialQA: Exploring Controversy in Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 3962–3966, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
ControversialQA: Exploring Controversy in Question Answering (Wang et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.351.pdf