Self-Supervised Test-Time Learning for Reading Comprehension

Pratyay Banerjee, Tejas Gokhale, Chitta Baral

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

Recent work on unsupervised question answering has shown that models can be trained with procedurally generated question-answer pairs and can achieve performance competitive with supervised methods. In this work, we consider the task of unsupervised reading comprehension and present a method that performs “test-time learning” (TTL) on a given context (text passage), without requiring training on large-scale human-authored datasets containing context-question-answer triplets. This method operates directly on a single test context, uses self-supervision to train models on synthetically generated question-answer pairs, and then infers answers to unseen human-authored questions for this context. Our method achieves accuracies competitive with fully supervised methods and significantly outperforms current unsupervised methods. TTL methods with a smaller model are also competitive with the current state-of-the-art in unsupervised reading comprehension.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationNAACL-HLT 2021 - 2021 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)
Pages1200-1211
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085466
StatePublished - 2021
Event2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HLT 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Jun 6 2021Jun 11 2021

Publication series

NameNAACL-HLT 2021 - 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HLT 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period6/6/216/11/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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

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