Narrowing the Knowledge Evaluation Gap: Open-Domain Question Answering with Multi-Granularity Answers

Gal Yona, Roee Aharoni, Mor Geva


Abstract
Factual questions typically can be answered correctly at different levels of granularity. For example, both “August 4, 1961” and “1961” are correct answers to the question “When was Barack Obama born?”. Standard question answering (QA) evaluation protocols, however, do not explicitly take this into account and compare a predicted answer against answers of a single granularity level. In this work, we propose GRANOLA QA, a novel evaluation setting where a predicted answer is evaluated in terms of accuracy and informativeness against a set of multi-granularity answers. We present a simple methodology for enriching existing datasets with multi-granularity answers, and create GRANOLA-EQ, a multi-granularity version of the EntityQuestions dataset. We evaluate a range of decoding methods on GRANOLA-EQ, including a new algorithm, called Decoding with Response Aggregation (DRAG), that is geared towards aligning the response granularity with the model’s uncertainty. Our experiments show that large language models with standard decoding tend to generate specific answers, which are often incorrect. In contrast, when evaluated on multi-granularity answers, DRAG yields a nearly 20 point increase in accuracy on average, which further increases for rare entities. Overall, this reveals that standard evaluation and decoding schemes may significantly underestimate the knowledge encapsulated in LMs.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.365
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6737–6751
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.365
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.365
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gal Yona, Roee Aharoni, and Mor Geva. 2024. Narrowing the Knowledge Evaluation Gap: Open-Domain Question Answering with Multi-Granularity Answers. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6737–6751, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Narrowing the Knowledge Evaluation Gap: Open-Domain Question Answering with Multi-Granularity Answers (Yona et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.365.pdf