Related papers: Studying Strategically: Learning to Mask for Close…

Prior work in standardized science exams requires support from large text corpus, such as targeted science corpus fromWikipedia or SimpleWikipedia. However, retrieving knowledge from the large corpus is time-consuming and questions embedded…

In Embodied Question Answering (EmbodiedQA), an agent interacts with an environment to gather necessary information for answering user questions. Existing works have laid a solid foundation towards solving this interesting problem. But the…

Large language models are classically trained in stages: pretraining on raw text followed by post-training for instruction following and reasoning. However, this separation creates a fundamental limitation: many desirable behaviors such as…

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to perform well in answering questions and in producing long-form texts, both in few-shot closed-book settings. While the former can be validated using well-known evaluation metrics, the latter…

Question Answering (QA) is a longstanding challenge in natural language processing. Existing QA works mostly focus on specific question types, knowledge domains, or reasoning skills. The specialty in QA research hinders systems from…

Legal question answering (QA) has attracted increasing attention from people seeking legal advice, which aims to retrieve the most applicable answers from a large-scale database of question-answer pairs. Previous methods mainly use a…

Deep learning based question answering (QA) on English documents has achieved success because there is a large amount of English training examples. However, for most languages, training examples for high-quality QA models are not available.…

We frame Question Answering (QA) as a Reinforcement Learning task, an approach that we call Active Question Answering. We propose an agent that sits between the user and a black box QA system and learns to reformulate questions to elicit…

Recent work on training neural retrievers for open-domain question answering (OpenQA) has employed both supervised and unsupervised approaches. However, it remains unclear how unsupervised and supervised methods can be used most effectively…

Video Question Answering (Video QA) requires fine-grained understanding of both video and language modalities to answer the given questions. In this paper, we propose novel training schemes for multiple-choice video question answering with…

We analyze the language learned by an agent trained with reinforcement learning as a component of the ActiveQA system [Buck et al., 2017]. In ActiveQA, question answering is framed as a reinforcement learning task in which an agent sits…

It has recently been observed that neural language models trained on unstructured text can implicitly store and retrieve knowledge using natural language queries. In this short paper, we measure the practical utility of this approach by…

Pre-trained Generative models such as BART, T5, etc. have gained prominence as a preferred method for text generation in various natural language processing tasks, including abstractive long-form question answering (QA) and summarization.…

We propose a pre-training objective based on question answering (QA) for learning general-purpose contextual representations, motivated by the intuition that the representation of a phrase in a passage should encode all questions that the…

Pre-training a language model and then fine-tuning it for downstream tasks has demonstrated state-of-the-art results for various NLP tasks. Pre-training is usually independent of the downstream task, and previous works have shown that this…

We present an efficient method of utilizing pretrained language models, where we learn selective binary masks for pretrained weights in lieu of modifying them through finetuning. Extensive evaluations of masking BERT and RoBERTa on a series…

The need for a large amount of labeled data in the supervised setting has led recent studies to utilize self-supervised learning to pre-train deep neural networks using unlabeled data. Many self-supervised training strategies have been…

The zero-shot chain of thought (CoT) approach is often used in question answering (QA) by language models (LMs) for tasks that require multiple reasoning steps. However, some QA tasks hinge more on accessing relevant knowledge than on…

Question answering (QA) tasks have been posed using a variety of formats, such as extractive span selection, multiple choice, etc. This has led to format-specialized models, and even to an implicit division in the QA community. We argue…

To completely understand a document, the use of textual information is not enough. Understanding visual cues, such as layouts and charts, is also required. While the current state-of-the-art approaches for document understanding (both…