Recent advancements in open-domain question answering (ODQA), i.e., finding answers from large open-domain corpus like Wikipedia, have led to human-level performance on many datasets. However, progress in QA over book stories (Book QA) lags behind despite its similar task formulation to ODQA. This work provides a comprehensive and quantitative analysis about the difficulty of Book QA: (1) We benchmark the research on the NarrativeQA dataset with extensive experiments with cutting-edge ODQA techniques. This quantifies the challenges Book QA poses, as well as advances the published state-of-the-art with a $\sim$7\% absolute improvement on Rouge-L. (2) We further analyze the detailed challenges in Book QA through human studies.\footnote{\url{https://github.com/gorov/BookQA}.} Our findings indicate that the event-centric questions dominate this task, which exemplifies the inability of existing QA models to handle event-oriented scenarios.

Automatic math problem solving has recently attracted increasing attention as a long-standing AI benchmark. In this paper, we focus on solving geometric problems, which requires a comprehensive understanding of textual descriptions, visual diagrams, and theorem knowledge. However, the existing methods were highly dependent on handcraft rules and were merely evaluated on small-scale datasets. Therefore, we propose a Geometric Question Answering dataset GeoQA, containing 5,010 geometric problems with corresponding annotated programs, which illustrate the solving process of the given problems. Compared with another publicly available dataset GeoS, GeoQA is 25 times larger, in which the program annotations can provide a practical testbed for future research on explicit and explainable numerical reasoning. Moreover, we introduce a Neural Geometric Solver (NGS) to address geometric problems by comprehensively parsing multimodal information and generating interpretable programs. We further add multiple self-supervised auxiliary tasks on NGS to enhance cross-modal semantic representation. Extensive experiments on GeoQA validate the effectiveness of our proposed NGS and auxiliary tasks. However, the results are still significantly lower than human performance, which leaves large room for future research. Our benchmark and code are released at https://github.com/chen-judge/GeoQA .

Generating some appealing questions in open-domain conversations is an effective way to improve human-machine interactions and lead the topic to a broader or deeper direction. To avoid dull or deviated questions, some researchers tried to utilize answer, the "future" information, to guide question generation. However, they separate a post-question-answer (PQA) triple into two parts: post-question (PQ) and question-answer (QA) pairs, which may hurt the overall coherence. Besides, the QA relationship is modeled as a one-to-one mapping that is not reasonable in open-domain conversations. To tackle these problems, we propose a generative triple-wise model with hierarchical variations for open-domain conversational question generation (CQG). Latent variables in three hierarchies are used to represent the shared background of a triple and one-to-many semantic mappings in both PQ and QA pairs. Experimental results on a large-scale CQG dataset show that our method significantly improves the quality of questions in terms of fluency, coherence and diversity over competitive baselines.

Question answering (QA) systems provide a way of querying the information available in various formats including, but not limited to, unstructured and structured data in natural languages. It constitutes a considerable part of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) which has led to the introduction of a special research topic on Conversational Question Answering (CQA), wherein a system is required to understand the given context and then engages in multi-turn QA to satisfy the user's information needs. Whilst the focus of most of the existing research work is subjected to single-turn QA, the field of multi-turn QA has recently grasped attention and prominence owing to the availability of large-scale, multi-turn QA datasets and the development of pre-trained language models. With a good amount of models and research papers adding to the literature every year recently, there is a dire need of arranging and presenting the related work in a unified manner to streamline future research. This survey, therefore, is an effort to present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research trends of CQA primarily based on reviewed papers from 2016-2021.

Automatic math problem solving has recently attracted increasing attention as a long-standing AI benchmark. In this paper, we focus on solving geometric problems, which requires a comprehensive understanding of textual descriptions, visual diagrams, and theorem knowledge. However, the existing methods were highly dependent on handcraft rules and were merely evaluated on small-scale datasets. Therefore, we propose a Geometric Question Answering dataset GeoQA, containing 5,010 geometric problems with corresponding annotated programs, which illustrate the solving process of the given problems. Compared with another publicly available dataset GeoS, GeoQA is 25 times larger, in which the program annotations can provide a practical testbed for future research on explicit and explainable numerical reasoning.

Question answering (QA) systems provide a way of querying the information available in various formats including, but not limited to, unstructured and structured data in natural languages. It constitutes a considerable part of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) which has led to the introduction of a special research topic on Conversational Question Answering (CQA), wherein a system is required to understand the given context and then engages in multi-turn QA to satisfy the user's information needs. Whilst the focus of most of the existing research work is subjected to single-turn QA, the field of multi-turn QA has recently grasped attention and prominence owing to the availability of large-scale, multi-turn QA datasets and the development of pre-trained language models. With a good amount of models and research papers adding to the literature every year recently, there is a dire need of arranging and presenting the related work in a unified manner to streamline future research. This survey, therefore, is an effort to present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research trends of CQA primarily based on reviewed papers from 2016-2021. Our findings show that there has been a trend shift from single-turn to multi-turn QA which empowers the field of Conversational AI from different perspectives. This survey is intended to provide an epitome for the research community with the hope of laying a strong foundation for the field of CQA.

We study calibration in question answering, estimating whether model correctly predicts answer for each question. Unlike prior work which mainly rely on the model's confidence score, our calibrator incorporates information about the input example (e.g., question and the evidence context). Together with data augmentation via back translation, our simple approach achieves 5-10% gains in calibration accuracy on reading comprehension benchmarks. Furthermore, we present the first calibration study in the open retrieval setting, comparing the calibration accuracy of retrieval-based span prediction models and answer generation models. Here again, our approach shows consistent gains over calibrators relying on the model confidence. Our simple and efficient calibrator can be easily adapted to many tasks and model architectures, showing robust gains in all settings.

Neural models have shown impressive performance gains in answering queries from natural language text. However, existing works are unable to support database queries, such as "List/Count all female athletes who were born in 20th century", which require reasoning over sets of relevant facts with operations such as join, filtering and aggregation. We show that while state-of-the-art transformer models perform very well for small databases, they exhibit limitations in processing noisy data, numerical operations, and queries that aggregate facts. We propose a modular architecture to answer these database-style queries over multiple spans from text and aggregating these at scale. We evaluate the architecture using WikiNLDB, a novel dataset for exploring such queries. Our architecture scales to databases containing thousands of facts whereas contemporary models are limited by how many facts can be encoded. In direct comparison on small databases, our approach increases overall answer accuracy from 85% to 90%. On larger databases, our approach retains its accuracy whereas transformer baselines could not encode the context.

In adversarial data collection (ADC), a human workforce interacts with a model in real time, attempting to produce examples that elicit incorrect predictions. Researchers hope that models trained on these more challenging datasets will rely less on superficial patterns, and thus be less brittle. However, despite ADC's intuitive appeal, it remains unclear when training on adversarial datasets produces more robust models. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale controlled study focused on question answering, assigning workers at random to compose questions either (i) adversarially (with a model in the loop); or (ii) in the standard fashion (without a model). Across a variety of models and datasets, we find that models trained on adversarial data usually perform better on other adversarial datasets but worse on a diverse collection of out-of-domain evaluation sets. Finally, we provide a qualitative analysis of adversarial (vs standard) data, identifying key differences and offering guidance for future research.

Hybrid data combining both tabular and textual content (e.g., financial reports) are quite pervasive in the real world. However, Question Answering (QA) over such hybrid data is largely neglected in existing research. In this work, we extract samples from real financial reports to build a new large-scale QA dataset containing both Tabular And Textual data, named TAT-QA, where numerical reasoning is usually required to infer the answer, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, counting, comparison/sorting, and the compositions. We further propose a novel QA model termed TAGOP, which is capable of reasoning over both tables and text. It adopts sequence tagging to extract relevant cells from the table along with relevant spans from the text to infer their semantics, and then applies symbolic reasoning over them with a set of aggregation operators to arrive at the final answer. TAGOPachieves 58.0% inF1, which is an 11.1% absolute increase over the previous best baseline model, according to our experiments on TAT-QA. But this result still lags far behind performance of expert human, i.e.90.8% in F1. It is demonstrated that our TAT-QA is very challenging and can serve as a benchmark for training and testing powerful QA models that address hybrid form data.