Answer Consolidation: Formulation and Benchmarking
Wenxuan Zhou, Qiang Ning, Heba Elfardy, Kevin Small, Muhao Chen
Abstract
Current question answering (QA) systems primarily consider the single-answer scenario, where each question is assumed to be paired with one correct answer. However, in many real-world QA applications, multiple answer scenarios arise where consolidating answers into a comprehensive and non-redundant set of answers is a more efficient user interface. In this paper, we formulate the problem of answer consolidation, where answers are partitioned into multiple groups, each representing different aspects of the answer set. Then, given this partitioning, a comprehensive and non-redundant set of answers can be constructed by picking one answer from each group. To initiate research on answer consolidation, we construct a dataset consisting of 4,699 questions and 24,006 sentences and evaluate multiple models. Despite a promising performance achieved by the best-performing supervised models, we still believe this task has room for further improvements.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{zhou-etal-2022-answer,
title = "Answer Consolidation: Formulation and Benchmarking",
author = "Zhou, Wenxuan and
Ning, Qiang and
Elfardy, Heba and
Small, Kevin and
Chen, Muhao",
editor = "Carpuat, Marine and
de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine and
Meza Ruiz, Ivan Vladimir",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
month = jul,
year = "2022",
address = "Seattle, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.320/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.320",
pages = "4314--4325"
}