IfQA: A Dataset for Open-domain Question Answering under Counterfactual Presuppositions

Wenhao Yu, Meng Jiang, Peter Clark, Ashish Sabharwal


Abstract
Although counterfactual reasoning is a fundamental aspect of intelligence, the lack of large-scale counterfactual open-domain question-answering (QA) benchmarks makes it difficult to evaluate and improve models on this ability. To address this void, we introduce the first such dataset, named IfQA, where each question is based on a counterfactual presupposition via an “if” clause. Such questions require models to go beyond retrieving direct factual knowledge from the Web: they must identify the right information to retrieve and reason about an imagined situation that may even go against the facts built into their parameters. The IfQA dataset contains 3,800 questions that were annotated by crowdworkers on relevant Wikipedia passages. Empirical analysis reveals that the IfQA dataset is highly challenging for existing open-domain QA methods, including supervised retrieve-then-read pipeline methods (F1 score 44.5), as well as recent few-shot approaches such as chain-of-thought prompting with ChatGPT (F1 score 57.2). We hope the unique challenges posed by IfQA will push open-domain QA research on both retrieval and reasoning fronts, while also helping endow counterfactual reasoning abilities to today’s language understanding models.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.515
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8276–8288
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.515
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.515
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenhao Yu, Meng Jiang, Peter Clark, and Ashish Sabharwal. 2023. IfQA: A Dataset for Open-domain Question Answering under Counterfactual Presuppositions. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8276–8288, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
IfQA: A Dataset for Open-domain Question Answering under Counterfactual Presuppositions (Yu et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.515.pdf