SPARTQA: A Textual Question Answering Benchmark for Spatial Reasoning
Roshanak Mirzaee, Hossein Rajaby Faghihi, Qiang Ning, Parisa Kordjamshidi
Abstract
This paper proposes a question-answering (QA) benchmark for spatial reasoning on natural language text which contains more realistic spatial phenomena not covered by prior work and is challenging for state-of-the-art language models (LM). We propose a distant supervision method to improve on this task. Specifically, we design grammar and reasoning rules to automatically generate a spatial description of visual scenes and corresponding QA pairs. Experiments show that further pretraining LMs on these automatically generated data significantly improves LMs’ capability on spatial understanding, which in turn helps to better solve two external datasets, bAbI, and boolQ. We hope that this work can foster investigations into more sophisticated models for spatial reasoning over text.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{mirzaee-etal-2021-spartqa,
title = "{SPARTQA}: A Textual Question Answering Benchmark for Spatial Reasoning",
author = "Mirzaee, Roshanak and
Rajaby Faghihi, Hossein and
Ning, Qiang and
Kordjamshidi, Parisa",
editor = "Toutanova, Kristina and
Rumshisky, Anna and
Zettlemoyer, Luke and
Hakkani-Tur, Dilek and
Beltagy, Iz and
Bethard, Steven and
Cotterell, Ryan and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Zhou, Yichao",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
month = jun,
year = "2021",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.364/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.364",
pages = "4582--4598"
}