Syn-QA2: Evaluating False Assumptions in Long-tail Questions with Synthetic QA Datasets

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Daswani, Ashwin, Sawant, Rohan, Kim, Najoung
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Daswani, Ashwin
Sawant, Rohan
Kim, Najoung
author_facet Daswani, Ashwin
Sawant, Rohan
Kim, Najoung
contents Sensitivity to false assumptions (or false premises) in information-seeking questions is critical for robust question-answering (QA) systems. Recent work has shown that false assumptions in naturally occurring questions pose challenges to current models, with low performance on both generative QA and simple detection tasks (Kim et al. 2023). However, the focus of existing work on naturally occurring questions leads to a gap in the analysis of model behavior on the long tail of the distribution of possible questions. To this end, we introduce Syn-(QA)$^2$, a set of two synthetically generated QA datasets: one generated using perturbed relations from Wikidata, and the other by perturbing HotpotQA (Yang et al. 2018). Our findings from evaluating a range of large language models are threefold: (1) false assumptions in QA are challenging, echoing the findings of prior work, (2) the binary detection task is challenging even compared to the difficulty of generative QA itself, possibly due to the linguistic structure of the problem, and (3) the detection task is more challenging with long-tail questions compared to naturally occurring questions, highlighting the utility of our synthetic datasets and generation method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_12145
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publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Syn-QA2: Evaluating False Assumptions in Long-tail Questions with Synthetic QA Datasets
Daswani, Ashwin
Sawant, Rohan
Kim, Najoung
Computation and Language
Sensitivity to false assumptions (or false premises) in information-seeking questions is critical for robust question-answering (QA) systems. Recent work has shown that false assumptions in naturally occurring questions pose challenges to current models, with low performance on both generative QA and simple detection tasks (Kim et al. 2023). However, the focus of existing work on naturally occurring questions leads to a gap in the analysis of model behavior on the long tail of the distribution of possible questions. To this end, we introduce Syn-(QA)$^2$, a set of two synthetically generated QA datasets: one generated using perturbed relations from Wikidata, and the other by perturbing HotpotQA (Yang et al. 2018). Our findings from evaluating a range of large language models are threefold: (1) false assumptions in QA are challenging, echoing the findings of prior work, (2) the binary detection task is challenging even compared to the difficulty of generative QA itself, possibly due to the linguistic structure of the problem, and (3) the detection task is more challenging with long-tail questions compared to naturally occurring questions, highlighting the utility of our synthetic datasets and generation method.
title Syn-QA2: Evaluating False Assumptions in Long-tail Questions with Synthetic QA Datasets
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12145