Question Answering

The COCO (Common Objects in Context) dataset is a large-scale object detection, segmentation, and captioning dataset. It is designed to encourage research on a wide variety of object categories and is commonly used for benchmarking computer vision models. It is an essential dataset for researchers and developers working on object detection, segmentation, and pose estimation tasks.

The MNIST database (Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology database) is a large collection of handwritten digits. It has a training set of 60,000 examples, and a test set of 10,000 examples. It is a subset of a larger NIST Special Database 3 (digits written by employees of the United States Census Bureau) and Special Database 1 (digits written by high school students) which contain monochrome images of handwritten digits. The digits have been size-normalized and centered in a fixed-size image. The original black and white (bilevel) images from NIST were size normalized to fit in a 20x20 pixel box while preserving their aspect ratio. The resulting images contain grey levels as a result of the anti-aliasing technique used by the normalization algorithm. the images were centered in a 28x28 image by computing the center of mass of the pixels, and translating the image so as to position this point at the center of the 28x28 field. Source: http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/ Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNIST_database#/media/File:MnistExamples.png

MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) is a new benchmark designed to measure knowledge acquired during pretraining by evaluating models exclusively in zero-shot and few-shot settings. This makes the benchmark more challenging and more similar to how we evaluate humans. The benchmark covers 57 subjects across STEM, the humanities, the social sciences, and more. It ranges in difficulty from an elementary level to an advanced professional level, and it tests both world knowledge and problem solving ability. Subjects range from traditional areas, such as mathematics and history, to more specialized areas like law and ethics. The granularity and breadth of the subjects makes the benchmark ideal for identifying a model’s blind spots. Image source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.03300v3.pdf

The Natural Questions corpus is a question answering dataset containing 307,373 training examples, 7,830 development examples, and 7,842 test examples. Each example is comprised of a google.com query and a corresponding Wikipedia page. Each Wikipedia page has a passage (or long answer) annotated on the page that answers the question and one or more short spans from the annotated passage containing the actual answer. The long and the short answer annotations can however be empty. If they are both empty, then there is no answer on the page at all. If the long answer annotation is non-empty, but the short answer annotation is empty, then the annotated passage answers the question but no explicit short answer could be found. Finally 1% of the documents have a passage annotated with a short answer that is “yes” or “no”, instead of a list of short spans. Source: A BERT Baseline for the Natural Questions Image Source: https://paperswithcode.com/paper/natural-questions-a-benchmark-for-question/

MATH is a new dataset of 12,500 challenging competition mathematics problems. Each problem in MATH has a full step-by-step solution which can be used to teach models to generate answer derivations and explanations. Source: Hendrycks et al. Image source: Hendrycks et al.

The MS MARCO (Microsoft MAchine Reading Comprehension) is a collection of datasets focused on deep learning in search. The first dataset was a question answering dataset featuring 100,000 real Bing questions and a human generated answer. Over time the collection was extended with a 1,000,000 question dataset, a natural language generation dataset, a passage ranking dataset, keyphrase extraction dataset, crawling dataset, and a conversational search. Source: https://microsoft.github.io/msmarco/ Image Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.08267.pdf

HellaSwag is a challenge dataset for evaluating commonsense NLI that is specially hard for state-of-the-art models, though its questions are trivial for humans (>95% accuracy).

TriviaQA is a realistic text-based question answering dataset which includes 950K question-answer pairs from 662K documents collected from Wikipedia and the web. This dataset is more challenging than standard QA benchmark datasets such as Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), as the answers for a question may not be directly obtained by span prediction and the context is very long. TriviaQA dataset consists of both human-verified and machine-generated QA subsets. Source: Episodic Memory Reader: Learning What to Rememberfor Question Answering from Streaming Data Image Source: Joshi et al

HotpotQA is a question answering dataset collected on the English Wikipedia, containing about 113K crowd-sourced questions that are constructed to require the introduction paragraphs of two Wikipedia articles to answer. Each question in the dataset comes with the two gold paragraphs, as well as a list of sentences in these paragraphs that crowdworkers identify as supporting facts necessary to answer the question. A diverse range of reasoning strategies are featured in HotpotQA, including questions involving missing entities in the question, intersection questions (What satisfies property A and property B?), and comparison questions, where two entities are compared by a common attribute, among others. In the few-document distractor setting, the QA models are given ten paragraphs in which the gold paragraphs are guaranteed to be found; in the open-domain fullwiki setting, the models are only given the question and the entire Wikipedia. Models are evaluated on their answer accuracy and explainability, where the former is measured as overlap between the predicted and gold answers with exact match (EM) and unigram F1, and the latter concerns how well the predicted supporting fact sentences match human annotation (Supporting Fact EM/F1). A joint metric is also reported on this dataset, which encourages systems to perform well on both tasks simultaneously. Source: Answering Complex Open-domain Questions Through Iterative Query Generation Image Source: Yang et al

ConceptNet is a knowledge graph that connects words and phrases of natural language with labeled edges. Its knowledge is collected from many sources that include expert-created resources, crowd-sourcing, and games with a purpose. It is designed to represent the general knowledge involved in understanding language, improving natural language applications by allowing the application to better understand the meanings behind the words people use. Source: ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge Image Source: Speer et al

PIQA is a dataset for commonsense reasoning, and was created to investigate the physical knowledge of existing models in NLP. Source: PIQA

WinoGrande is a large-scale dataset of 44k problems, inspired by the original WSC design, but adjusted to improve both the scale and the hardness of the dataset. The key steps of the dataset construction consist of (1) a carefully designed crowdsourcing procedure, followed by (2) systematic bias reduction using a novel AfLite algorithm that generalizes human-detectable word associations to machine-detectable embedding associations. Source: WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale Image Source: https://winogrande.allenai.org/

BoolQ is a question answering dataset for yes/no questions containing 15942 examples. These questions are naturally occurring – they are generated in unprompted and unconstrained settings. Each example is a triplet of (question, passage, answer), with the title of the page as optional additional context. Questions are gathered from anonymized, aggregated queries to the Google search engine. Queries that are likely to be yes/no questions are heuristically identified and questions are only kept if a Wikipedia page is returned as one of the first five results, in which case the question and Wikipedia page are given to a human annotator for further processing. Annotators label question/article pairs in a three-step process. First, they decide if the question is good, meaning it is comprehensible, unambiguous, and requesting factual information. This judgment is made before the annotator sees the Wikipedia page. Next, for good questions, annotators find a passage within the document that contains enough information to answer the question. Annotators can mark questions as “not answerable” if the Wikipedia article does not contain the requested information. Finally, annotators mark whether the question’s answer is “yes” or “no”. Only questions that were marked as having a yes/no answer are used, and each question is paired with the selected passage instead of the entire document. Source: https://github.com/google-research-datasets/boolean-questions Image Source: BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions

The Reddit dataset is a graph dataset from Reddit posts made in the month of September, 2014. The node label in this case is the community, or “subreddit”, that a post belongs to. 50 large communities have been sampled to build a post-to-post graph, connecting posts if the same user comments on both. In total this dataset contains 232,965 posts with an average degree of 492. The first 20 days are used for training and the remaining days for testing (with 30% used for validation). For features, off-the-shelf 300-dimensional GloVe CommonCrawl word vectors are used. Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.02216.pdf Image Source: https://minimaxir.com/2016/05/reddit-graph/

OpenBookQA is a new kind of question-answering dataset modeled after open book exams for assessing human understanding of a subject. It consists of 5,957 multiple-choice elementary-level science questions (4,957 train, 500 dev, 500 test), which probe the understanding of a small “book” of 1,326 core science facts and the application of these facts to novel situations. For training, the dataset includes a mapping from each question to the core science fact it was designed to probe. Answering OpenBookQA questions requires additional broad common knowledge, not contained in the book. The questions, by design, are answered incorrectly by both a retrieval-based algorithm and a word co-occurrence algorithm. Additionally, the dataset includes a collection of 5,167 crowd-sourced common knowledge facts, and an expanded version of the train/dev/test questions where each question is associated with its originating core fact, a human accuracy score, a clarity score, and an anonymized crowd-worker ID. Source: https://allenai.org/data/open-book-qa Image Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.02789.pdf

TruthfulQA is a benchmark to measure whether a language model is truthful in generating answers to questions. The benchmark comprises 817 questions that span 38 categories, including health, law, finance and politics. The authors crafted questions that some humans would answer falsely due to a false belief or misconception. Image source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.07958v1.pdf

CNN/Daily Mail is a dataset for text summarization. Human generated abstractive summary bullets were generated from news stories in CNN and Daily Mail websites as questions (with one of the entities hidden), and stories as the corresponding passages from which the system is expected to answer the fill-in the-blank question. The authors released the scripts that crawl, extract and generate pairs of passages and questions from these websites. In all, the corpus has 286,817 training pairs, 13,368 validation pairs and 11,487 test pairs, as defined by their scripts. The source documents in the training set have 766 words spanning 29.74 sentences on an average while the summaries consist of 53 words and 3.72 sentences. Source: Abstractive Text Summarization using Sequence-to-sequence RNNs and Beyond

FEVER is a publicly available dataset for fact extraction and verification against textual sources. It consists of 185,445 claims manually verified against the introductory sections of Wikipedia pages and classified as SUPPORTED, REFUTED or NOTENOUGHINFO. For the first two classes, systems and annotators need to also return the combination of sentences forming the necessary evidence supporting or refuting the claim. The claims were generated by human annotators extracting claims from Wikipedia and mutating them in a variety of ways, some of which were meaning-altering. The verification of each claim was conducted in a separate annotation process by annotators who were aware of the page but not the sentence from which original claim was extracted and thus in 31.75% of the claims more than one sentence was considered appropriate evidence. Claims require composition of evidence from multiple sentences in 16.82% of cases. Furthermore, in 12.15% of the claims, this evidence was taken from multiple pages. Source: FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification

TextVQA is a dataset to benchmark visual reasoning based on text in images. TextVQA requires models to read and reason about text in images to answer questions about them. Specifically, models need to incorporate a new modality of text present in the images and reason over it to answer TextVQA questions. Statistics * 28,408 images from OpenImages * 45,336 questions * 453,360 ground truth answers

The ReAding Comprehension dataset from Examinations (RACE) dataset is a machine reading comprehension dataset consisting of 27,933 passages and 97,867 questions from English exams, targeting Chinese students aged 12-18. RACE consists of two subsets, RACE-M and RACE-H, from middle school and high school exams, respectively. RACE-M has 28,293 questions and RACE-H has 69,574. Each question is associated with 4 candidate answers, one of which is correct. The data generation process of RACE differs from most machine reading comprehension datasets - instead of generating questions and answers by heuristics or crowd-sourcing, questions in RACE are specifically designed for testing human reading skills, and are created by domain experts. Source: Dynamic Fusion Networks for Machine Reading Comprehension Image Source: Lai et al

Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs DROP is a crowdsourced, adversarially-created, 96k-question benchmark, in which a system must resolve references in a question, perhaps to multiple input positions, and perform discrete operations over them (such as addition, counting, or sorting). These operations require a much more comprehensive understanding of the content of paragraphs than what was necessary for prior datasets. The questions consist of passages extracted from Wikipedia articles. The dataset is split into a training set of about 77,000 questions, a development set of around 9,500 questions and a hidden test set similar in size to the development set. Source: https://allennlp.org/drop Image Source: DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs

Outside Knowledge Visual Question Answering (OK-VQA) includes more than 14,000 questions that require external knowledge to answer. Source: OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge Image Source: https://okvqa.allenai.org/

A challenge set for elementary-level Math Word Problems (MWP). An MWP consists of a short Natural Language narrative that describes a state of the world and poses a question about some unknown quantities. The examples in SVAMP test a model across different aspects of solving MWPs: 1) Is the model question sensitive? 2) Does the model have robust reasoning ability? 3) Is it invariant to structural alterations?

BIG-Bench Hard (BBH) is a subset of the BIG-Bench, a diverse evaluation suite for language models. BBH focuses on a suite of 23 challenging tasks from BIG-Bench that were found to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. These tasks are ones where prior language model evaluations did not outperform the average human-rater. The BBH tasks require multi-step reasoning, and it was found that few-shot prompting without Chain-of-Thought (CoT), as done in the BIG-Bench evaluations, substantially underestimates the best performance and capabilities of language models. When CoT prompting was applied to BBH tasks, it enabled PaLM to surpass the average human-rater performance on 10 of the 23 tasks, and Codex to surpass the average human-rater performance on 17 of the 23 tasks.

Automatic image captioning is the task of producing a natural-language utterance (usually a sentence) that correctly reflects the visual content of an image. Up to this point, the resource most used for this task was the MS-COCO dataset, containing around 120,000 images and 5-way image-caption annotations (produced by paid annotators). Google's Conceptual Captions dataset has more than 3 million images, paired with natural-language captions. In contrast with the curated style of the MS-COCO images, Conceptual Captions images and their raw descriptions are harvested from the web, and therefore represent a wider variety of styles. The raw descriptions are harvested from the Alt-text HTML attribute associated with web images. The authors developed an automatic pipeline that extracts, filters, and transforms candidate image/caption pairs, with the goal of achieving a balance of cleanliness, informativeness, fluency, and learnability of the resulting captions. Source: Conceptual Captions Image Source: Sharma et al

The Beyond the Imitation Game Benchmark (BIG-bench) is a collaborative benchmark intended to probe large language models and extrapolate their future capabilities. Big-bench include more than 200 tasks. Image source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.04615.pdf

Science Question Answering (ScienceQA) is a new benchmark that consists of 21,208 multimodal multiple choice questions with diverse science topics and annotations of their answers with corresponding lectures and explanations. Out of the questions in ScienceQA, 10,332 (48.7%) have an image context, 10,220 (48.2%) have a text context, and 6,532 (30.8%) have both. Most questions are annotated with grounded lectures (83.9%) and detailed explanations (90.5%). The lecture and explanation provide general external knowledge and specific reasons, respectively, for arriving at the correct answer. To the best of our knowledge, ScienceQA is the first large-scale multimodal dataset that annotates lectures and explanations for the answers. ScienceQA, in contrast to previous datasets, has richer domain diversity from three subjects: natural science, language science, and social science. Questions in each subject are categorized first by the topic (Biology, Physics, Chemistry, etc.), then by the category (Plants, Cells, Animals, etc.), and finally by the skill (Classify fruits and vegetables as plant parts, Identify countries of Africa, etc.). ScienceQA features 26 topics, 127 categories, and 379 skills that cover a wide range of domains.

The Choice Of Plausible Alternatives (COPA) evaluation provides researchers with a tool for assessing progress in open-domain commonsense causal reasoning. COPA consists of 1000 questions, split equally into development and test sets of 500 questions each. Each question is composed of a premise and two alternatives, where the task is to select the alternative that more plausibly has a causal relation with the premise. The correct alternative is randomized so that the expected performance of randomly guessing is 50%. Source: Choice of Plausible Alternatives (COPA) Image Source: https://people.ict.usc.edu/~gordon/copa.html

Multiple choice question answering based on the United States Medical License Exams (USMLE). The dataset is collected from the professional medical board exams. It covers three languages: English, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese, and contains 12,723, 34,251, and 14,123 questions for the three languages, respectively.

BEIR (Benchmarking IR) is a heterogeneous benchmark containing different information retrieval (IR) tasks. Through BEIR, it is possible to systematically study the zero-shot generalization capabilities of multiple neural retrieval approaches. The benchmark contains a total of 9 information retrieval tasks (Fact Checking, Citation Prediction, Duplicate Question Retrieval, Argument Retrieval, News Retrieval, Question Answering, Tweet Retrieval, Biomedical IR, Entity Retrieval) from 19 different datasets: * MS MARCO * TREC-COVID * NFCorpus * BioASQ * Natural Questions * HotpotQA * FiQA-2018 * Signal-1M * TREC-News * ArguAna * Touche 2020 * CQADupStack * Quora Question Pairs * DBPedia * SciDocs * FEVER * Climate-FEVER * SciFact * Robust04

StrategyQA is a question answering benchmark where the required reasoning steps are implicit in the question, and should be inferred using a strategy. It includes 2,780 examples, each consisting of a strategy question, its decomposition, and evidence paragraphs. Questions in StrategyQA are short, topic-diverse, and cover a wide range of strategies.

DocVQA consists of 50,000 questions defined on 12,000+ document images. Source: DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images

CoQA is a large-scale dataset for building Conversational Question Answering systems. The goal of the CoQA challenge is to measure the ability of machines to understand a text passage and answer a series of interconnected questions that appear in a conversation. CoQA contains 127,000+ questions with answers collected from 8000+ conversations. Each conversation is collected by pairing two crowdworkers to chat about a passage in the form of questions and answers. The unique features of CoQA include 1) the questions are conversational; 2) the answers can be free-form text; 3) each answer also comes with an evidence subsequence highlighted in the passage; and 4) the passages are collected from seven diverse domains. CoQA has a lot of challenging phenomena not present in existing reading comprehension datasets, e.g., coreference and pragmatic reasoning. Source: https://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/ Image Source: https://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/

The task of PubMedQA is to answer research questions with yes/no/maybe (e.g.: Do preoperative statins reduce atrial fibrillation after coronary artery bypass grafting?) using the corresponding abstracts. PubMedQA has 1k expert labeled, 61.2k unlabeled and 211.3k artificially generated QA instances. Source: PubMedQA Image Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.06146v1.pdf

The NewsQA dataset is a crowd-sourced machine reading comprehension dataset of 120,000 question-answer pairs. * Documents are CNN news articles. * Questions are written by human users in natural language. * Answers may be multiword passages of the source text. * Questions may be unanswerable. * NewsQA is collected using a 3-stage, siloed process. * Questioners see only an article’s headline and highlights. * Answerers see the question and the full article, then select an answer passage. * Validators see the article, the question, and a set of answers that they rank. * NewsQA is more natural and more challenging than previous datasets. Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/newsqa-dataset/ Image Source: Trischler et al

WikiSQL consists of a corpus of 87,726 hand-annotated SQL query and natural language question pairs. These SQL queries are further split into training (61,297 examples), development (9,145 examples) and test sets (17,284 examples). It can be used for natural language inference tasks related to relational databases. Source: SQL-to-Text Generation with Graph-to-Sequence Model Image Source: https://blog.einstein.ai/how-to-talk-to-your-database/