Yes, No or IDK: The Challenge of Unanswerable Yes/No Questions

Elior Sulem, Jamaal Hay, Dan Roth

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Yes/No QA task (Clark et al., 2019) consists of “Yes” or “No” questions about a given context. However, in realistic scenarios, the information provided in the context is not always sufficient in order to answer the question. For example, given the context “She married a lawyer from New-York.”, we don't know whether the answer to the question “Did she marry in New York?” is “Yes” or “No”. In this paper, we extend the Yes/No QA task, adding questions with an IDK answer, and show its considerable difficulty compared to the original 2-label task. For this purpose, we (i) enrich the BoolQ dataset (Clark et al., 2019) to include unanswerable questions and (ii) create out-of-domain test sets for the Yes/No/IDK QA task. We study the contribution of training on other Natural Language Understanding tasks. We focus in particular on Extractive QA (Rajpurkar et al., 2018) and Recognizing Textual Entailments (RTE, Dagan et al., 2013), analyzing the differences between 2 and 3 labels using the new data.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNAACL 2022 - 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1075-1085
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917711
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2022
Externally publishedYes
Event2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022 - Seattle, United States
Duration: 10 Jul 202215 Jul 2022

Publication series

NameNAACL 2022 - 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle
Period10/07/2215/07/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems
  • Software

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