Open AccessComputer Science

T. Kwiatkowski, J. Palomaki, Olivia Redfield, Michael Collins, Ankur P. Parikh, Chris Alberti, D. Epstein, I. Polosukhin, Jacob Devlin, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, Llion Jones, Matthew Kelcey, Ming-Wei Chang, Andrew M. Dai, Jakob Uszkoreit, Quoc V. Le, Slav Petrov

2019.8.1Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

DOI: 10.1162/tacl_a_00276

tlooto Summary

The Natural Questions corpus, a question answering data set, is presented, introducing robust metrics for the purposes of evaluating question answering systems; demonstrating high human upper bounds on these metrics; and establishing baseline results using competitive methods drawn from related literature.

Abstract

We present the Natural Questions corpus, a question answering data set. Questions consist of real anonymized, aggregated queries issued to the Google search engine. An annotator is presented with a question along with a Wikipedia page from the top 5 search results, and annotates a long answer (typically a paragraph) and a short answer (one or more entities) if present on the page, or marks null if no long/short answer is present. The public release consists of 307,373 training examples with single annotations; 7,830 examples with 5-way annotations for development data; and a further 7,842 examples with 5-way annotated sequestered as test data. We present experiments validating quality of the data. We also describe analysis of 25-way annotations on 302 examples, giving insights into human variability on the annotation task. We introduce robust metrics for the purposes of evaluating question answering systems; demonstrate high human upper bounds on these metrics; and establish baseline results using competitive methods drawn from related literature.

Citation format

KWIATKOWSKI, T., et al. Natural questions: A benchmark for question answering research. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019, 7: 453–466.