Cited by 523Topic ModelingMultimodal Machine Learning ApplicationsNatural Language Processing Techniques

UNIFIEDQA: Crossing Format Boundaries with a Single QA System

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Khashabi, Daniel, Min, Sewon, Khot, Tushar, Sabharwal, Ashish, Tafjord, Oyvind, Clark, Peter, Hajishirzi, Hannaneh·2020·Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Abstract

Question answering (QA) tasks have been posed using a variety of formats, such as extractive span selection, multiple choice, etc.This has led to format-specialized models, and even to an implicit division in the QA community.We argue that such boundaries are artificial and perhaps unnecessary, given the reasoning abilities we seek to teach are not governed by the format.As evidence, we use the latest advances in language modeling to build a single pre-trained QA model, UNIFIEDQA, that performs well across 20 QA datasets spanning 4 diverse formats.UNIFIEDQA performs on par with 8 different models that were trained on individual datasets themselves.Even when faced with 12 unseen datasets of observed formats, UNIFIEDQA performs surprisingly well, showing strong generalization from its out-offormat training data.Finally, fine-tuning this pre-trained QA model into specialized models results in a new state of the art on 10 factoid and commonsense QA datasets, establishing UNIFIEDQA as a strong starting point for building QA systems. 1 1 https://github.com/allenai/unifiedqaExtractive [SQuAD] Question: At what speed did the turbine operate?Context: (Nikola_Tesla) On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 horsepower (150 kilowatts) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine.... Gold answer: 16,000 rpm Multiple-Choice [ARC-challenge] Question: What does photosynthesis produce that helps plants grow?Candidate Answers: (A) water (B) oxygen (C) protein (D) sugar Gold answer: sugar Yes/No [BoolQ]Question: Was America the first country to have a president?Context: (President) The first usage of the word president to denote the highest official in a government was during the Commonwealth of England ... Gold answer: no Abstractive [NarrativeQA]Question: What does a drink from narcissus's spring cause the drinker to do? Context: Mercury has awakened Echo, who weeps for Narcissus, and states that a drink from Narcissus's spring causes the drinkers to "Grow dotingly enamored of themselves."... Gold answer: fall in love with themselves

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  • UnifiedQA models generally do better on truthfulness than the three GPT families but are the least informative.

    “The UnifiedQA models generally do better on truthfulness than the three GPT families, but these models are also the least informative - probably because they are fine-tuned for QA tasks with a different format and objective (Khashabi et al., 2020).”

    From TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods (2022) · cites this paper as Khashabi et al., 2020

    Section 3.2 identifies UnifiedQA as a model trained on question-answering datasets spanning four formats, supporting the cited explanation of its training. The paper does not compare UnifiedQA with GPT families on truthfulness or informativeness, or establish that its training causes either result. No page number is available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Longer phrasal or sentential answers are often used in language generation tasks and in multiple-choice question answering.

    “Longer phrasal or sentential answers are often used in language generation tasks [105] and in other tasks such as multiple-choice question answering (where the scores of multiple phrases are compared against each-other; Khashabi et al. [55]).”

    From Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing (2023) · cites this paper as [55]

    Section 3.1 describes multiple-choice QA as choosing among candidate answers, and Table 2 reports multi-token average answer lengths for several multiple-choice datasets. The cited paper therefore supports the use of phrasal answers in multiple-choice QA, but the passages do not establish the parenthetical claim that scores of multiple phrases are compared. The language-generation part is attached to a different citation. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. Dheeru Dua, Ananth Gottumukkala, Alon Talmor, Matt Gardner, and Sameer Singh. 2019a. Compre- hensive multi-dataset evaluation of reading compre- hension. In 2nd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering.
  2. Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever. 2019b. Lan- guage models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI Blog, 1(8):9.
  3. Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer, Adam Roberts, Katherine Lee, Sharan Narang, Michael Matena, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li, and Peter J Liu. 2020. Exploring the limits of transfer learning with a unified text-to-text trans- former. JMLR.

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Authors
Khashabi, D., Min, S., Khot, T., Sabharwal, A., Tafjord, O., Clark, P., & Hajishirzi, H.
Affiliations
  • Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (US)
  • University of Washington (US)
Venue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Published
2020
Pages
1896-1907
OpenAlex
W3020908159
Cited by
514
References
51
Citations by year
2026: 23 · 2025: 52 · 2024: 63 · 2023: 129 · 2022: 113 · 2021: 101 · 2020: 33
FWCI
35.91
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP (Findings of EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
  • Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (N66001, N66001-19-2-403, N66001-19)
  • Office of Naval Research (N00014-18, N00014-18-1-2826, ONR-N00014, N00014)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
question answering, pre-trained language models, multiple-choice question answering, yes/no question answering, fine-tuning, factoid question answering, commonsense question answering, SQuAD, ARC-Challenge

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