Rob Fergus


2019

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Finding Generalizable Evidence by Learning to Convince Q&A Models
Ethan Perez | Siddharth Karamcheti | Rob Fergus | Jason Weston | Douwe Kiela | Kyunghyun Cho
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

We propose a system that finds the strongest supporting evidence for a given answer to a question, using passage-based question-answering (QA) as a testbed. We train evidence agents to select the passage sentences that most convince a pretrained QA model of a given answer, if the QA model received those sentences instead of the full passage. Rather than finding evidence that convinces one model alone, we find that agents select evidence that generalizes; agent-chosen evidence increases the plausibility of the supported answer, as judged by other QA models and humans. Given its general nature, this approach improves QA in a robust manner: using agent-selected evidence (i) humans can correctly answer questions with only ~20% of the full passage and (ii) QA models can generalize to longer passages and harder questions.