Differentiating Choices via Commonality for Multiple-Choice Question Answering

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Hauptverfasser: Deng, Wenqing, Wang, Zhe, Wang, Kewen, Pan, Shirui, Zhang, Xiaowang, Feng, Zhiyong
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Deng, Wenqing
Wang, Zhe
Wang, Kewen
Pan, Shirui
Zhang, Xiaowang
Feng, Zhiyong
author_facet Deng, Wenqing
Wang, Zhe
Wang, Kewen
Pan, Shirui
Zhang, Xiaowang
Feng, Zhiyong
contents Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) becomes particularly challenging when all choices are relevant to the question and are semantically similar. Yet this setting of MCQA can potentially provide valuable clues for choosing the right answer. Existing models often rank each choice separately, overlooking the context provided by other choices. Specifically, they fail to leverage the semantic commonalities and nuances among the choices for reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel MCQA model by differentiating choices through identifying and eliminating their commonality, called DCQA. Our model captures token-level attention of each choice to the question, and separates tokens of the question attended to by all the choices (i.e., commonalities) from those by individual choices (i.e., nuances). Using the nuances as refined contexts for the choices, our model can effectively differentiate choices with subtle differences and provide justifications for choosing the correct answer. We conduct comprehensive experiments across five commonly used MCQA benchmarks, demonstrating that DCQA consistently outperforms baseline models. Furthermore, our case study illustrates the effectiveness of the approach in directing the attention of the model to more differentiating features.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_11554
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Differentiating Choices via Commonality for Multiple-Choice Question Answering
Deng, Wenqing
Wang, Zhe
Wang, Kewen
Pan, Shirui
Zhang, Xiaowang
Feng, Zhiyong
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) becomes particularly challenging when all choices are relevant to the question and are semantically similar. Yet this setting of MCQA can potentially provide valuable clues for choosing the right answer. Existing models often rank each choice separately, overlooking the context provided by other choices. Specifically, they fail to leverage the semantic commonalities and nuances among the choices for reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel MCQA model by differentiating choices through identifying and eliminating their commonality, called DCQA. Our model captures token-level attention of each choice to the question, and separates tokens of the question attended to by all the choices (i.e., commonalities) from those by individual choices (i.e., nuances). Using the nuances as refined contexts for the choices, our model can effectively differentiate choices with subtle differences and provide justifications for choosing the correct answer. We conduct comprehensive experiments across five commonly used MCQA benchmarks, demonstrating that DCQA consistently outperforms baseline models. Furthermore, our case study illustrates the effectiveness of the approach in directing the attention of the model to more differentiating features.
title Differentiating Choices via Commonality for Multiple-Choice Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11554