Improving Question Answering with External Knowledge

TL;DR

This paper investigates leveraging external knowledge sources, like Wikipedia and additional training data, to improve multiple-choice science question answering, achieving significant accuracy gains but also revealing limitations in data difficulty levels.

Contribution

It introduces simple methods for incorporating external knowledge into subject-area QA and provides empirical analysis of their effectiveness and limitations.

Findings

Wikipedia-based knowledge enrichment improves accuracy significantly.

Adding more training instances can sometimes degrade performance.

External knowledge integration shows promise but has limitations depending on data difficulty.

Abstract

We focus on multiple-choice question answering (QA) tasks in subject areas such as science, where we require both broad background knowledge and the facts from the given subject-area reference corpus. In this work, we explore simple yet effective methods for exploiting two sources of external knowledge for subject-area QA. The first enriches the original subject-area reference corpus with relevant text snippets extracted from an open-domain resource (i.e., Wikipedia) that cover potentially ambiguous concepts in the question and answer options. As in other QA research, the second method simply increases the amount of training data by appending additional in-domain subject-area instances. Experiments on three challenging multiple-choice science QA tasks (i.e., ARC-Easy, ARC-Challenge, and OpenBookQA) demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods: in comparison to the previous state-of-the-art, we obtain absolute gains in accuracy of up to 8.1%, 13.0%, and 12.8%, respectively. While we observe consistent gains when we introduce knowledge from Wikipedia, we find that employing additional QA training instances is not uniformly helpful: performance degrades when the added instances exhibit a higher level of difficulty than the original training data. As one of the first studies on exploiting unstructured external knowledge for subject-area QA, we hope our methods, observations, and discussion of the exposed limitations may shed light on further developments in the area.