Learning to Explain: Datasets and Models for Identifying Valid Reasoning Chains in Multihop Question-Answering

By Harsh Jhamtani, Peter Clark. 2020

81 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite the rapid progress in multihop question-answering (QA), models still have trouble explaining why an answer is correct, with limited explanation training data available to learn from. To address this, we introduce three explanation datasets in which explanations formed from corpus facts are annotated. Our first dataset, eQASC, contains over 98K explanation annotations for the multihop question answering dataset QASC, and is the first that annotates multiple candidate explanations for each answer. The second dataset eQASC-perturbed is constructed by crowd-sourcing perturbations (while preserving their validity) of a subset of explanations in QASC, to test consistency and generalization of explanation prediction models. The third dataset eOBQA is constructed by adding explanation annotations to the OBQA dataset to test generalization of models trained on eQASC. We show that this data can be used to significantly improve explanation quality (+14% absolute F1 over a strong retrieval baseline) using a BERT-based classifier, but still behind the upper bound, offering a new challenge for future research. We also explore a delexicalized chain representation in which repeated noun phrases are replaced by variables, thus turning them into generalized reasoning chains (for example: "X is a Y" AND "Y has Z" IMPLIES "X has Z"). We find that generalized chains maintain performance while also being more robust to certain perturbations.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Natural Language Processing, Prompting & Reasoning

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

  1. Mohit Bansal
  2. Hannaneh Hajishirzi
  3. Yejin Choi
  4. Peter Clark
  5. Ana Marasovic
  6. Pan Lu
  7. Kai-Wei Chang
  8. Luke S. Zettlemoyer

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

  1. Mohit Bansal
  2. Luc Van Gool
  3. Andrew Zisserman
  4. Trevor Darrell
  5. Xiaogang Wang
  6. Ming-Hsuan Yang
  7. Jitendra Malik
  8. Dacheng Tao

In Natural Language Processing

  1. Mohit Bansal
  2. Peter Clark
  3. Yejin Choi
  4. Dan Roth
  5. Ana Marasovic
  6. Greg Durrett
  7. Hannaneh Hajishirzi
  8. Kai-Wei Chang

In Prompting & Reasoning

  1. Murray Shanahan
  2. Antonia Creswell
  3. Pan Lu
  4. Peter Clark
  5. Sarah Wiegreffe
  6. Ana Marasovic
  7. Irina Higgins
  8. Mohit Bansal

Citations in the corpus