Open domain question answering (ODQA) is a longstanding task aimed at answering factual questions from a large knowledge corpus without any explicit evidence in natural language processing (NLP). Recent works have predominantly focused on improving the answering accuracy and achieved promising progress. However, higher accuracy often comes with more memory consumption and inference latency, which might not necessarily be efficient enough for direct deployment in the real world. Thus, a trade-off between accuracy, memory consumption and processing speed is pursued. In this paper, we provide a survey of recent advances in the efficiency of ODQA models. We walk through the ODQA models and conclude the core techniques on efficiency. Quantitative analysis on memory cost, processing speed, accuracy and overall comparison are given. We hope that this work would keep interested scholars informed of the advances and open challenges in ODQA efficiency research, and thus contribute to the further development of ODQA efficiency.

Data augmentation has attracted a lot of research attention in the deep learning era for its ability in alleviating data sparseness. The lack of labeled data for unseen evaluation databases is exactly the major challenge for cross-domain text-to-SQL parsing. Previous works either require human intervention to guarantee the quality of generated data, or fail to handle complex SQL queries. This paper presents a simple yet effective data augmentation framework. First, given a database, we automatically produce a large number of SQL queries based on an abstract syntax tree grammar. For better distribution matching, we require that at least 80% of SQL patterns in the training data are covered by generated queries. Second, we propose a hierarchical SQL-to-question generation model to obtain high-quality natural language questions, which is the major contribution of this work. Finally, we design a simple sampling strategy that can greatly improve training efficiency given large amounts of generated data. Experiments on three cross-domain datasets, i.e., WikiSQL and Spider in English, and DuSQL in Chinese, show that our proposed data augmentation framework can consistently improve performance over strong baselines, and the hierarchical generation component is the key for the improvement.

Event argument extraction has long been studied as a sequential prediction problem with extractive-based methods, tackling each argument in isolation. Although recent work proposes generation-based methods to capture cross-argument dependency, they require generating and post-processing a complicated target sequence (template). Motivated by these observations and recent pretrained language models' capabilities of learning from demonstrations. We propose a retrieval-augmented generative QA model (R-GQA) for event argument extraction. It retrieves the most similar QA pair and augments it as prompt to the current example's context, then decodes the arguments as answers. Our approach outperforms substantially prior methods across various settings (i.e. fully supervised, domain transfer, and fewshot learning). Finally, we propose a clustering-based sampling strategy (JointEnc) and conduct a thorough analysis of how different strategies influence the few-shot learning performance. The implementations are available at https:// github.com/xinyadu/RGQA

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) [1] is an attractive service mining and analytics method that has attracted extensive attention from academic and industrial circles in recent years. Given a natural language question, the KBQA system aims to answer the correct target entities from a given knowledge base (KB) [2]. It relies on certain capabilities including capturing rich semantic information to understand natural language questions clearly and seek correct answers in large scale structured knowledge databases accurately. Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) [3, 4] is a popular research branch of KBQA which uses a knowledge graph (KG) as its knowledge source [2, 5] and uses factoid triples stored in KG to answer natural language questions. Thanks to KG's unique data structure and its efficient querying capability, users can benefit from a more efficient acquisition of the substantial and valuable KG knowledge, and gain excellent customer experience.

Today is a great day because our first blog post is being published. We introduce our project in this blog post. Let's start with the name of the project. The project name is Question Assistant Barlas. We thought why not give a human name to our question-generating machine like Alan Turing's Christopher.

Biomedical knowledge graphs (KG) are heterogenous networks consisting of biological entities as nodes and relations between them as edges. These entities and relations are extracted from millions of research papers and unified in a single resource. The goal of biomedical multi-hop question-answering over knowledge graph (KGQA) is to help biologist and scientist to get valuable insights by asking questions in natural language. Relevant answers can be found by first understanding the question and then querying the KG for right set of nodes and relationships to arrive at an answer. To model the question, language models such as RoBERTa and BioBERT are used to understand context from natural language question. One of the challenges in KGQA is missing links in the KG. Knowledge graph embeddings (KGE) help to overcome this problem by encoding nodes and edges in a dense and more efficient way. In this paper, we use a publicly available KG called Hetionet which is an integrative network of biomedical knowledge assembled from 29 different databases of genes, compounds, diseases, and more. We have enriched this KG dataset by creating a multi-hop biomedical question-answering dataset in natural language for testing the biomedical multi-hop question-answering system and this dataset will be made available to the research community. The major contribution of this research is an integrated system that combines language models with KG embeddings to give highly relevant answers to free-form questions asked by biologists in an intuitive interface. Biomedical multi-hop question-answering system is tested on this data and results are highly encouraging.

There is a key problem in the medical visual question answering task that how to effectively realize the feature fusion of language and medical images with limited datasets. In order to better utilize multi-scale information of medical images, previous methods directly embed the multi-stage visual feature maps as tokens of same size respectively and fuse them with text representation. However, this will cause the confusion of visual features at different stages. To this end, we propose a simple but powerful multi-stage feature fusion method, MF2-MVQA, which stage-wise fuses multi-level visual features with textual semantics. MF2-MVQA achieves the State-Of-The-Art performance on VQA-Med 2019 and VQA-RAD dataset. The results of visualization also verify that our model outperforms previous work.

Question answering models commonly have access to two sources of "knowledge" during inference time: (1) parametric knowledge - the factual knowledge encoded in the model weights, and (2) contextual knowledge - external knowledge (e.g., a Wikipedia passage) given to the model to generate a grounded answer. Having these two sources of knowledge entangled together is a core issue for generative QA models as it is unclear whether the answer stems from the given non-parametric knowledge or not. This unclarity has implications on issues of trust, interpretability and factuality. In this work, we propose a new paradigm in which QA models are trained to disentangle the two sources of knowledge. Using counterfactual data augmentation, we introduce a model that predicts two answers for a given question: one based on given contextual knowledge and one based on parametric knowledge. Our experiments on the Natural Questions dataset show that this approach improves the performance of QA models by making them more robust to knowledge conflicts between the two knowledge sources, while generating useful disentangled answers.

There are many potential benefits to news readers accessing diverse sources. Modern news aggregators do the hard work of organizing the news, offering readers a plethora of source options, but choosing which source to read remains challenging. We propose a new framework to assist readers in identifying source differences and gaining an understanding of news coverage diversity. The framework is based on the generation of Discord Questions: questions with a diverse answer pool, explicitly illustrating source differences. To assemble a prototype of the framework, we focus on two components: (1) discord question generation, the task of generating questions answered differently by sources, for which we propose an automatic scoring method, and create a model that improves performance from current question generation (QG) methods by 5%, (2) answer consolidation, the task of grouping answers to a question that are semantically similar, for which we collect data and repurpose a method that achieves 81% balanced accuracy on our realistic test set. We illustrate the framework's feasibility through a prototype interface. Even though model performance at discord QG still lags human performance by more than 15%, generated questions are judged to be more interesting than factoid questions and can reveal differences in the level of detail, sentiment, and reasoning of sources in news coverage.

The General QA field has been developing the methodology referencing the Stanford Question answering dataset (SQuAD) as the significant benchmark. However, compiling factual questions is accompanied by time- and labour-consuming annotation, limiting the training data's potential size. We present the WikiOmnia dataset, a new publicly available set of QA-pairs and corresponding Russian Wikipedia article summary sections, composed with a fully automated generative pipeline. The dataset includes every available article from Wikipedia for the Russian language. The WikiOmnia pipeline is available open-source and is also tested for creating SQuAD-formatted QA on other domains, like news texts, fiction, and social media. The resulting dataset includes two parts: raw data on the whole Russian Wikipedia (7,930,873 QA pairs with paragraphs for ruGPT-3 XL and 7,991,040 QA pairs with paragraphs for ruT5-large) and cleaned data with strict automatic verification (over 160,000 QA pairs with paragraphs for ruGPT-3 XL and over 3,400,000 QA pairs with paragraphs for ruT5-large).