Tell Me Why: Using Question Answering as Distant Supervision for Answer Justification

Rebecca Sharp, Mihai Surdeanu, Peter Jansen, Marco A. Valenzuela-Escárcega, Peter Clark, Michael Hammond


Abstract
For many applications of question answering (QA), being able to explain why a given model chose an answer is critical. However, the lack of labeled data for answer justifications makes learning this difficult and expensive. Here we propose an approach that uses answer ranking as distant supervision for learning how to select informative justifications, where justifications serve as inferential connections between the question and the correct answer while often containing little lexical overlap with either. We propose a neural network architecture for QA that reranks answer justifications as an intermediate (and human-interpretable) step in answer selection. Our approach is informed by a set of features designed to combine both learned representations and explicit features to capture the connection between questions, answers, and answer justifications. We show that with this end-to-end approach we are able to significantly improve upon a strong IR baseline in both justification ranking (+9% rated highly relevant) and answer selection (+6% P@1).
Anthology ID:
K17-1009
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017)
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
69–79
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K17-1009
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K17-1009
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rebecca Sharp, Mihai Surdeanu, Peter Jansen, Marco A. Valenzuela-Escárcega, Peter Clark, and Michael Hammond. 2017. Tell Me Why: Using Question Answering as Distant Supervision for Answer Justification. In Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017), pages 69–79, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tell Me Why: Using Question Answering as Distant Supervision for Answer Justification (Sharp et al., CoNLL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/K17-1009.pdf