Joon-Ho Lim  Hyun-ki Kim

10.5626/JOK.2021.48.3.275

Machine Reading Comprehension pre-trained language model mrc generalization

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) entails identification of the correct answer in a paragraph when a natural language question and paragraph are provided. Recently, fine-tuning based on a pre-trained language model yields the best performance. In this study, we evaluated the ability of machine-reading comprehension method to generalize question and paragraph pairs, rather than similar training sets. Towards this end, the cross-evaluation between datasets and blind evaluation was performed. The results showed a correlation between generalization performance and datasets such as answer length and overlap ratio between question and paragraph. As a result of blind evaluation, the evaluation dataset with the long answer and low lexical overlap between the questions and paragraphs resulted in less than 80% performance. Finally, the generalized performance of the MRC model under the open domain QA environment was evaluated, and the performance of the MRC using the searched paragraph was found to be degraded. According to the MRC task characteristics, the difficulty and differences in generalization performance depend on the relationship between the question and the answer, suggesting the need for analysis of different evaluation sets.