We investigate a framework for machine reading, inspired by real world information-seeking problems, where a meta question answering system interacts with a black box environment. The environment encapsulates a competitive machine reader based on BERT, providing candidate answers to questions, and possibly some context. To validate the realism of our formulation, we ask humans to play the role of a meta-answerer. With just a small snippet of text around an answer, humans can outperform the machine reader, improving recall. Similarly, a simple machine meta-answerer outperforms the environment, improving both precision and recall on the Natural Questions dataset. The system relies on joint training of answer scoring and the selection of conditioning information.
@article{arxiv.1911.04156,
title = {Meta Answering for Machine Reading},
author = {Benjamin Borschinger and Jordan Boyd-Graber and Christian Buck and Jannis Bulian and Massimiliano Ciaramita and Michelle Chen Huebscher and Wojciech Gajewski and Yannic Kilcher and Rodrigo Nogueira and Lierni Sestorain Saralegu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.04156},
year = {2020}
}