72 - The Anatomy Question Answering Task, with Jordan Boyd-Graber

Our first episode in a new format: broader surveys of areas,
instead of specific discussions on individual papers. In this
episode, we talk with Jordan Boyd-Graber about question answering.
Matt starts the discussion by giving five different axes on which
question answering tasks vary: (1)how complex is the language in
the question, (2)what is the genre of the question / nature of the
question semantics, (3)what is the context or knowledge source used
to answer the question, (4)how much "reasoning" is required to
answer the question, and (5) what's the format of the answer? We
talk about each of these in detail, giving examples from Jordan's
and others' work. In the end, we conclude that "question answering"
is a format to study a particular phenomenon, it is not a
"phenomenon" in itself. Sometimes it's useful to pose a phenomenon
you want to study as a question answering task, and sometimes it's
not. During the conversation, Jordan mentioned the QANTA
competition; you can find that here: http://qanta.org. We also
talked about an adversarial question creation task for Quiz Bowl
questions; the paper on that can be found here:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Trick-Me-If-You-Can%3A-Adversarial-Writing-of-Trivia-Wallace-Boyd-Graber/11caf090fef96605d6d67c7505572b1a26796971.