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EMNLP Findings2023

RoMQA: A Benchmark for Robust, Multi-evidence, Multi-answer Question Answering

Victor Zhong, Weijia Shi, Wen-tau Yih, Luke Zettlemoyer

Abstract

We introduce RoMQA, the first benchmark for robust, multi-evidence, multi-answer question answering (QA). RoMQA contains clusters of questions that are derived from related constraints mined from the Wikidata knowledge graph. RoMQA evaluates robustness of QA models to varying constraints by measuring worst-case performance within each question cluster. Compared to prior QA datasets, RoMQA has more human-written questions that require reasoning over more evidence text and have, on average, many more correct answers. In addition, human annotators rate RoMQA questions as more natural or likely to be asked by people. We evaluate state-of-the-art large language models in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings, and find that RoMQA is challenging: zeroshot and few-shot models perform similarly to naive baselines, while supervised retrieval methods perform well below gold evidence upper bounds. Moreover, existing models are not robust to variations in question constraints, but can be made more robust by tuning on clusters of related questions. Our results show that RoMQA is a challenging benchmark for large language models, and provides a quantifiable test to build more robust QA methods.

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Cited by top-tier papers5

  1. FLASK: Fine-grained Language Model Evaluation based on Alignment Skill SetsSeonghyeon Ye, Doyoung Kim, Sungdong Kim, Hyeonbin Hwang et al.ICLR 2024 · 176 citations
  2. Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions?Yang Chen, Hexiang Hu, Yi Luan, Haitian Sun et al.EMNLP 2023 · 37 citations
  3. QUEST: A Retrieval Dataset of Entity-Seeking Queries with Implicit Set OperationsChaitanya Malaviya, Peter Shaw, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee et al.ACL 2023 · 11 citations
  4. Preserving Knowledge Invariance: Rethinking Robustness Evaluation of Open Information ExtractionJi Qi, Chuchun Zhang, Xiaozhi Wang, Kaisheng Zeng et al.EMNLP 2023 · 2 citations
  5. Evaluating D-MERIT of Partial-annotation on Information RetrievalRoyi Rassin, Yaron Fairstein, Oren Kalinsky, Guy Kushilevitz et al.EMNLP 2024 · 1 citation

Builds on6

  1. Language Models are Few-Shot LearnersTom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah et al.NeurIPS 2020 · 64,255 citations
  2. Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackLong Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 24,707 citations
  3. BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and ComprehensionMike Lewis, Yinhan Liu, Naman Goyal, Marjan Ghazvininejad et al.ACL 2020 · 1,224 citations
  4. Noisy Channel Language Model Prompting for Few-Shot Text ClassificationSewon Min, Mike Lewis, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke ZettlemoyerACL 2022 · 237 citations
  5. AmbigQA: Answering Ambiguous Open-domain QuestionsSewon Min, Julian Michael, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke ZettlemoyerEMNLP 2020 · 162 citations

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