论文标题
向右看:减轻提取问题回答中的相对位置偏差
Look to the Right: Mitigating Relative Position Bias in Extractive Question Answering
论文作者
论文摘要
提取问题答案(QA)模型倾向于利用虚假相关性,以在训练集具有意想不到的偏见时做出预测。这种趋势导致模型无法推广到相关性不存在的示例。确定QA模型可以利用的虚假相关性对于在现实世界应用中构建可推广的QA模型至关重要。此外,即使训练集有偏见,也需要开发一种方法,以阻止这些模型学习虚假相关性。在这项研究中,我们发现答案的相对位置被定义为从答案跨度到最接近的问题 - 字幕重叠词的相对距离,可以用QA模型作为做出预测的表面提示来利用。具体而言,我们发现,当训练集中的相对位置有偏见时,在训练过程中没有看到的相对位置的示例表现会大大降低。为了减轻看不见的相对位置的绩效降解,我们提出了一种基于合奏的偏差方法,该方法不需要有关相对位置分布的先验知识。我们证明了所提出的方法使用有偏见和完整的小队数据集减轻模型对相对位置的依赖。我们希望这项研究可以帮助增强质量检查模型在现实世界应用中的概括能力。
Extractive question answering (QA) models tend to exploit spurious correlations to make predictions when a training set has unintended biases. This tendency results in models not being generalizable to examples where the correlations do not hold. Determining the spurious correlations QA models can exploit is crucial in building generalizable QA models in real-world applications; moreover, a method needs to be developed that prevents these models from learning the spurious correlations even when a training set is biased. In this study, we discovered that the relative position of an answer, which is defined as the relative distance from an answer span to the closest question-context overlap word, can be exploited by QA models as superficial cues for making predictions. Specifically, we find that when the relative positions in a training set are biased, the performance on examples with relative positions unseen during training is significantly degraded. To mitigate the performance degradation for unseen relative positions, we propose an ensemble-based debiasing method that does not require prior knowledge about the distribution of relative positions. We demonstrate that the proposed method mitigates the models' reliance on relative positions using the biased and full SQuAD dataset. We hope that this study can help enhance the generalization ability of QA models in real-world applications.