CausalQA: A Benchmark for Causal Question Answering
Alexander Bondarenko, Magdalena Wolska, Stefan Heindorf, Lukas Blübaum, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Benno Stein, Pavel Braslavski, Matthias Hagen
Abstract
At least 5% of questions submitted to search engines ask about cause-effect relationships in some way. To support the development of tailored approaches that can answer such questions, we construct Webis-CausalQA-22, a benchmark corpus of 1.1 million causal questions with answers. We distinguish different types of causal questions using a novel typology derived from a data-driven, manual analysis of questions from ten large question answering (QA) datasets. Using high-precision lexical rules, we extract causal questions of each type from these datasets to create our corpus. As an initial baseline, the state-of-the-art QA model UnifiedQA achieves a ROUGE-L F1 score of 0.48 on our new benchmark.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{bondarenko-etal-2022-causalqa,
title = "{C}ausal{QA}: A Benchmark for Causal Question Answering",
author = {Bondarenko, Alexander and
Wolska, Magdalena and
Heindorf, Stefan and
Bl{\"u}baum, Lukas and
Ngonga Ngomo, Axel-Cyrille and
Stein, Benno and
Braslavski, Pavel and
Hagen, Matthias and
Potthast, Martin},
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Huang, Chu-Ren and
Kim, Hansaem and
Pustejovsky, James and
Wanner, Leo and
Choi, Key-Sun and
Ryu, Pum-Mo and
Chen, Hsin-Hsi and
Donatelli, Lucia and
Ji, Heng and
Kurohashi, Sadao and
Paggio, Patrizia and
Xue, Nianwen and
Kim, Seokhwan and
Hahm, Younggyun and
He, Zhong and
Lee, Tony Kyungil and
Santus, Enrico and
Bond, Francis and
Na, Seung-Hoon",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = oct,
year = "2022",
address = "Gyeongju, Republic of Korea",
publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.291/",
pages = "3296--3308"
}