Cited by 714Topic ModelingSpeech and dialogue systemsInformation Retrieval and Search Behavior

QuAC: Question Answering in Context

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Choi, Eunsol, He, He, Iyyer, Mohit, Yatskar, Mark, Yih, Wen-tau, Choi, Yejin, Liang, Percy, Zettlemoyer, Luke·2018·Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Abstract

We present QuAC, a dataset for Question Answering in Context that contains 14K information-seeking QA dialogs (100K questions in total).The dialogs involve two crowd workers: (1) a student who poses a sequence of freeform questions to learn as much as possible about a hidden Wikipedia text, and (2) a teacher who answers the questions by providing short excerpts from the text.QuAC introduces challenges not found in existing machine comprehension datasets: its questions are often more open-ended, unanswerable, or only meaningful within the dialog context, as we show in a detailed qualitative evaluation.We also report results for a number of reference models, including a recently state-ofthe-art reading comprehension architecture extended to model dialog context.Our best model underperforms humans by 20 F1, suggesting that there is significant room for future work on this data.Dataset, baseline, and leaderboard available at http://quac.ai.How was perversion handled?How long was he there?How popular did she become?How did Mark Felt contact Woodword?How did the meeting go?How did it do on the charts?When was she born?When was it founded?When was the breakup?

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  • Most currently available datasets for training question generation systems are crowd-sourced, which largely affects the quality of generated questions.

    “Most datasets that are currently available for training question generation systems are crowd-sourced [42, 47, 84, 92, 114, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123], which largely impacts the quality of generated questions.”
  • For QA, on SQuADv2, QuAC, and many other datasets, fine-tuned models have superior performance, while on CoQA, LLMs perform as well as fine-tuned models.

    “For question answering (QA), on SQuADv2 [97], QuAC [24], and many other datasets, fine-tuned models have superior performance, while on CoQA [98], LLMs perform as well as fine-tuned models [25].”

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Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. Hao Fang, Hao Cheng, Elizabeth Clark, Ariel Holtz- man, Maarten Sap, Mari Ostendorf, Yejin Choi, and Noah A Smith. 2017. Sounding board-university of washingtons alexa prize submission. Alexa Prize Proceedings.
  2. Matthew E Peters, Mark Neumann, Mohit Iyyer, Matt Gardner, Christopher Clark, Kenton Lee, and Luke Zettlemoyer. 2018. Deep contextualized word rep- resentations. Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Lin- guistics.
  3. Marzieh Saeidi, Max Bartolo, Patrick Lewis, Sameer Signh, Tim Rocktschel, Mike Sheldon, Guillaume Bouchard, and Sebastian Riedel. 2018. Interpreta- tion of natural language rules in conversational ma- chine reading. In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
  4. Fabian M. Suchanek, Gjergji Kasneci, and Gerhard Weikum. 2007. Yago: a core of semantic knowl- edge. In Proceedings of the World Wide Web Con- ference.

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Authors
Choi, E., He, H., Iyyer, M., Yatskar, M., Yih, W.-T., Choi, Y., Liang, P., & Zettlemoyer, L.
Affiliations
University of Washington (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Published
2018
Pages
2174-2184
OpenAlex
W2888302696
Cited by
714
References
28
Citations by year
2026: 20 · 2025: 41 · 2024: 84 · 2023: 105 · 2022: 101 · 2021: 150 · 2020: 115 · 2019: 88 · 2018: 10
FWCI
36.11
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
  • Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Army Research Office (W911NF-15-1-, W911NF)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
Keywords
information-seeking questions, open-ended questions, unanswerable questions, reading comprehension

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