Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Rephrasing and Analyzing Ambiguous Questions in VQA

Elias Stengel-Eskin, Jimena Guallar-Blasco, Yi Zhou, Benjamin Van Durme


Abstract
Natural language is ambiguous. Resolving ambiguous questions is key to successfully answering them.Focusing on questions about images, we create a dataset of ambiguous examples. We annotate these, grouping answers by the underlying question they address and rephrasing the question for each group to reduce ambiguity. Our analysis reveals a linguistically-aligned ontology of reasons for ambiguity in visual questions. We then develop an English question-generation model which we demonstrate via automatic and human evaluation produces less ambiguous questions. We further show that the question generation objective we use allows the model to integrate answer group information without any direct supervision.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.569
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10220–10237
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.569
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.569
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elias Stengel-Eskin, Jimena Guallar-Blasco, Yi Zhou, and Benjamin Van Durme. 2023. Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Rephrasing and Analyzing Ambiguous Questions in VQA. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10220–10237, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Rephrasing and Analyzing Ambiguous Questions in VQA (Stengel-Eskin et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/2023.acl-long.569.pdf