Abstract Instruction-following models are attractive alternatives to fine-tuned approaches for question answering (QA). By simply prepending relevant documents and an instruction to their input, these models can be adapted to various information domains and tasks without additional training. However, these models tend to produce verbose responses with supplementary information, which makes traditional QA metrics like exact match (EM) and F1 unreliable for accurately quantifying model performance. In this work, we evaluate instruction-following models along two fronts: 1) how well they satisfy user’s information need (correctness), and 2) whether they disseminate information supported by the provided knowledge (faithfulness). Guided by human evaluation and analysis, we highlight the shortcomings of traditional metrics for both correctness and faithfulness and propose simple token-overlap metrics that correlate highly with human judgments. Our analysis reveals that for correctness, instruction-following models perform comparably to models specifically fine-tuned for that task. However, they struggle to accurately judge the relevance of the provided knowledge and often hallucinate in their responses. We hope our work encourages more holistic evaluation of instruction-following models for QA. Our code and human annotation data is available at https://github.com/McGill-NLP/instruct-qa.

Benno Krojer, Vaibhav Adlakha, Vibhav Vineet, Yash Goyal, Edoardo Ponti, Siva Reddy. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2022.

The goal of the seventh edition of SCAI (https://scai.info) is to bring together and further grow a community of researchers and practitioners interested in conversational systems for information access. The previous iterations of the workshop already demonstrated the breadth and multidisciplinarity inherent in the design and development of conversational search agents. The proposed shift from traditional web search to search interfaces enabled via human-like dialogue leads to a number of challenges, and although such challenges have received more attention in the recent years, there are many pending research questions that should be addressed by the information retrieval community and can largely benefit from a collaboration with other research fields, such as natural language processing, machine learning, human-computer interaction and dialogue systems. This workshop is intended as a platform enabling a continuous discussion of the major research challenges that surround the design of search-oriented conversational systems. This year, participants have the opportunity to meet in person and have more in-depth interactive discussions with a full-day onsite workshop.

Abstract In a conversational question answering scenario, a questioner seeks to extract information about a topic through a series of interdependent questions and answers. As the conversation progresses, they may switch to related topics, a phenomenon commonly observed in information-seeking search sessions. However, current datasets for conversational question answering are limiting in two ways: 1) they do not contain topic switches; and 2) they assume the reference text for the conversation is given, that is, the setting is not open-domain. We introduce TopiOCQA (pronounced Tapioca), an open-domain conversational dataset with topic switches based on Wikipedia. TopiOCQA contains 3,920 conversations with information-seeking questions and free-form answers. On average, a conversation in our dataset spans 13 question-answer turns and involves four topics (documents). TopiOCQA poses a challenging test-bed for models, where efficient retrieval is required on multiple turns of the same conversation, in conjunction with constructing valid responses using conversational history. We evaluate several baselines, by combining state-of-the-art document retrieval methods with neural reader models. Our best model achieves F1 of 55.8, falling short of human performance by 14.2 points, indicating the difficulty of our dataset. Our dataset and code are available at https://mcgill-nlp.github.io/topiocqa.

A recent state-of-the-art neural open information extraction (OpenIE) system generates extractions iteratively, requiring repeated encoding of partial outputs.This comes at a significant computational cost.On the other hand, sequence labeling approaches for OpenIE are much faster, but worse in extraction quality.In this paper, we bridge this trade-off by presenting an iterative labeling-based system that establishes a new state of the art for OpenIE, while extracting 10× faster.This is achieved through a novel Iterative Grid Labeling (IGL) architecture, which treats OpenIE as a 2-D grid labeling task.We improve its performance further by applying coverage (soft) constraints on the grid at training time.Moreover, on observing that the best OpenIE systems falter at handling coordination structures, our OpenIE system also incorporates a new coordination analyzer built with the same IGL architecture.This IGL based coordination analyzer helps our OpenIE system handle complicated coordination structures, while also establishing a new state of the art on the task of coordination analysis, with a 12.3 pts improvement in F1 over previous analyzers.Our OpenIE system, OpenIE6 1 , beats the previous systems by as much as 4 pts in F1, while being much faster.