(QA)$^2$: Question Answering with Questionable Assumptions

Najoung Kim, Phu Mon Htut, Samuel R. Bowman, Jackson Petty

Main: Discourse and Pragmatics Main-poster Paper

Poster Session 2: Discourse and Pragmatics (Poster)
Conference Room: Frontenac Ballroom and Queen's Quay
Conference Time: July 10, 14:00-15:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Poster Session 2 (18:00-19:30 UTC)
Keywords: conversation, communication
TLDR: Naturally occurring information-seeking questions often contain questionable assumptions---assumptions that are false or unverifiable. Questions containing questionable assumptions are challenging because they require a distinct answer strategy that deviates from typical answers for information-seek...
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Abstract: Naturally occurring information-seeking questions often contain questionable assumptions---assumptions that are false or unverifiable. Questions containing questionable assumptions are challenging because they require a distinct answer strategy that deviates from typical answers for information-seeking questions. For instance, the question "When did Marie Curie discover Uranium?" cannot be answered as a typical "when" question without addressing the false assumption "Marie Curie discovered Uranium". In this work, we propose (QA)\^2 (Question Answering with Questionable Assumptions), an open-domain evaluation dataset consisting of naturally occurring search engine queries that may or may not contain questionable assumptions. To be successful on (QA)\^2, systems must be able to detect questionable assumptions and also be able to produce adequate responses for both typical information-seeking questions and ones with questionable assumptions. Through human rater acceptability on end-to-end QA with (QA)\^2, we find that current models do struggle with handling questionable assumptions, leaving substantial headroom for progress.