Pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention for addressing open-domain Question Answering (QA). While they exhibit high accuracy in answering questions related to common knowledge, LLMs encounter difficulties in learning about uncommon long-tail knowledge (tail entities). Since manually constructing QA datasets demands substantial human resources, the types of existing QA datasets are limited, leaving us with a scarcity of datasets to study the performance of LLMs on tail entities. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach to generate specialized QA datasets for tail entities and present the associated research challenges. We conduct extensive experiments by employing pretrained LLMs on our newly generated long-tail QA datasets, comparing their performance with and without external resources including Wikipedia and Wikidata knowledge graphs.

Health insurance companies have a defined process called prior authorization (PA) which is a health plan cost-control process that requires doctors and other healthcare professionals to get clearance in advance from a health plan before performing a particular procedure on a patient in order to be eligible for payment coverage. For health insurance companies, approving PA requests for patients in the medical domain is a time-consuming and challenging task. One of those key challenges is validating if a request matches up to certain criteria such as age, gender, etc. In this work, we evaluate whether GPT can validate numerous key factors, in turn helping health plans reach a decision drastically faster. We frame it as a question answering task, prompting GPT to answer a question from patient electronic health record. We experiment with different conventional prompting techniques as well as introduce our own novel prompting technique. Moreover, we report qualitative assessment by humans on the natural language generation outputs from our approach. Results show that our method achieves superior performance with the mean weighted F1 score of 0.61 as compared to its standard counterparts.

Fabbri et al [8] and Li et al [11] further extended this idea with template-based Unsupervised question answering is a promising yet challenging question generation and iterative data refinement, but are still task, which alleviates the burden of building large-scale only applicable to EQA tasks. There are also some trials annotated data in a new domain. It motivates us to study the for MCQA without supervision. Liu and Lee [12] assumed unsupervised multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) the absence of correct answer labels, but directly train a QA problem. In this paper, we propose a novel framework designed model based on the context, question, and answer candidate to generate synthetic MCQA data barely based on sets. Ren and Zhu [13] emphasized the distractor generation, contexts from the universal domain without relying on any trying to construct a complete sample using the given context, form of manual annotation. Possible answers are extracted question, as well as the correct answer. Nevertheless, they and used to produce related questions, then we leverage still depend on a certain amount of data in the target domain, both named entities (NE) and knowledge graphs to discover like the contexts and questions, which further limits their plausible distractors to form complete synthetic samples.

In recent years, advancements in natural language processing (NLP) have been fueled by deep learning techniques, particularly through the utilization of powerful computing resources like GPUs and TPUs. Models such as BERT and GPT-3, trained on vast amounts of data, have revolutionized language understanding and generation. These pre-trained models serve as robust bases for various tasks including semantic understanding, intelligent writing, and reasoning, paving the way for a more generalized form of artificial intelligence. NLP, as a vital application of AI, aims to bridge the gap between humans and computers through natural language interaction. This paper delves into the current landscape and future prospects of large-scale model-based NLP, focusing on the question-answering systems within this domain. Practical cases and developments in artificial intelligence-driven question-answering systems are analyzed to foster further exploration and research in the realm of large-scale NLP.

Complex logical query answering is a challenging task in knowledge graphs (KGs) that has been widely studied. The ability to perform complex logical reasoning is essential and supports various graph reasoning-based downstream tasks, such as search engines. Recent approaches are proposed to represent KG entities and logical queries into embedding vectors and find answers to logical queries from the KGs. However, existing proposed methods mainly focus on querying a single KG and cannot be applied to multiple graphs. In addition, directly sharing KGs with sensitive information may incur privacy risks, making it impractical to share and construct an aggregated KG for reasoning to retrieve query answers. Thus, it remains unknown how to answer queries on multi-source KGs. An entity can be involved in various knowledge graphs and reasoning on multiple KGs and answering complex queries on multi-source KGs is important in discovering knowledge cross graphs. Fortunately, federated learning is utilized in knowledge graphs to collaboratively learn representations with privacy preserved. Federated knowledge graph embeddings enrich the relations in knowledge graphs to improve the representation quality. However, these methods only focus on one-hop relations and cannot perform complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we apply federated learning to complex query-answering tasks to reason over multi-source knowledge graphs while preserving privacy. We propose a Federated Complex Query Answering framework (FedCQA), to reason over multi-source KGs avoiding sensitive raw data transmission to protect privacy. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets and evaluate retrieval performance on various types of complex queries.

Document Visual Question Answering (DVQA) is a task that involves responding to queries based on the content of images. Existing work is limited to locating information within a single page and does not facilitate cross-page question-and-answer interaction. Furthermore, the token length limitation imposed on inputs to the model may lead to truncation of segments pertinent to the answer. In this study, we introduce a simple but effective methodology called CFRet-DVQA, which focuses on retrieval and efficient tuning to address this critical issue effectively. For that, we initially retrieve multiple segments from the document that correlate with the question at hand. Subsequently, we leverage the advanced reasoning abilities of the large language model (LLM), further augmenting its performance through instruction tuning. This approach enables the generation of answers that align with the style of the document labels. The experiments demonstrate that our methodology achieved state-of-the-art or competitive results with both single-page and multi-page documents in various fields.

In 3D Visual Question Answering (3D VQA), the scarcity of fully annotated data and limited visual content diversity hampers the generalization to novel scenes and 3D concepts (e.g., only around 800 scenes are utilized in ScanQA and SQA dataset). Current approaches resort supplement 3D reasoning with 2D information. However, these methods face challenges: either they use top-down 2D views that introduce overly complex and sometimes question-irrelevant visual clues, or they rely on globally aggregated scene/image-level representations from 2D VLMs, losing the fine-grained vision-language correlations. To overcome these limitations, our approach utilizes question-conditional 2D view selection procedure, pinpointing semantically relevant 2D inputs for crucial visual clues. We then integrate this 2D knowledge into the 3D-VQA system via a two-branch Transformer structure. This structure, featuring a Twin-Transformer design, compactly combines 2D and 3D modalities and captures fine-grained correlations between modalities, allowing them mutually augmenting each other. Integrating proposed mechanisms above, we present BridgeQA, that offers a fresh perspective on multi-modal transformer-based architectures for 3D-VQA. Experiments validate that BridgeQA achieves state-of-the-art on 3D-VQA datasets and significantly outperforms existing solutions. Code is available at $\href{https://github.com/matthewdm0816/BridgeQA}{\text{this URL}}$.

Temporal question answering (QA) involves time constraints, with phrases such as "... in 2019" or "... before COVID". In the former, time is an explicit condition, in the latter it is implicit. State-of-the-art methods have limitations along three dimensions. First, with neural inference, time constraints are merely soft-matched, giving room to invalid or inexplicable answers. Second, questions with implicit time are poorly supported. Third, answers come from a single source: either a knowledge base (KB) or a text corpus. We propose a temporal QA system that addresses these shortcomings. First, it enforces temporal constraints for faithful answering with tangible evidence. Second, it properly handles implicit questions. Third, it operates over heterogeneous sources, covering KB, text and web tables in a unified manner. The method has three stages: (i) understanding the question and its temporal conditions, (ii) retrieving evidence from all sources, and (iii) faithfully answering the question. As implicit questions are sparse in prior benchmarks, we introduce a principled method for generating diverse questions. Experiments show superior performance over a suite of baselines.

Current visual question answering (VQA) models tend to be trained and evaluated on image-question pairs in isolation. However, the questions people ask are dependent on their informational needs and prior knowledge about the image content. To evaluate how situating images within naturalistic contexts shapes visual questions, we introduce CommVQA, a VQA dataset consisting of images, image descriptions, real-world communicative scenarios where the image might appear (e.g., a travel website), and follow-up questions and answers conditioned on the scenario. We show that CommVQA poses a challenge for current models. Providing contextual information to VQA models improves performance broadly, highlighting the relevance of situating systems within a communicative scenario.

Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence A special issue covering select applications from IAAI-23 pg.