Exploiting redundancy in question answering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our goal is to automatically answer brief factual questions of the form ``When was the Battle of Hastings?'' or ``Who wrote The Wind in the Willows?''. Since the answer to nearly any such question can now be found somewhere on the Web, the problem reduces to finding potential answers in large volumes of data and validating their accuracy. We apply a method for arbitrary passage retrieval to the first half of the problem and demonstrate that answer redundancy can be used to address the second half. The success of our approach depends on the idea that the volume of available Web data is large enough to supply the answer to most factual questions multiple times and in multiple contexts. A query is generated from a question and this query is used to select short passages that may contain the answer from a large collection of Web data. These passages are analyzed to identify candidate answers. The frequency of these candidates within the passages is used to ``vote'' for the most likely answer. The approach is experimentally tested on questions taken from the TREC-9 question-answering test collection. As an additional demonstration, the approach is extended to answer multiple choice trivia questions of the form typically asked in trivia quizzes and television game shows.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".