# Multifaceted Improvements for Conversational Open-Domain Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.00266 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00266/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00300/) (2019)
- [RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08191/) (2020)
- [QuAC : Question Answering in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07036/) (2018)
- [Retrieving and Reading: A Comprehensive Survey on Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00774/) (2021)
- [Answering Complex Open-Domain Questions with Multi-Hop Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12756/) (2020)
- [Optimizing Dense Retrieval Model Training with Hard Negatives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08051/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Open-Domain Question Answering with BERTserini](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01718/) (2019)
- [Open-Retrieval Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11364/) (2020)
- [BERT with History Answer Embedding for Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05412/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Guided Text Retrieval and Reading for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03868/) (2019)
- [Attentive History Selection for Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09456/) (2019)
- [Complementing Lexical Retrieval with Semantic Residual Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13969/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Document Retrieval for Deep Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06528/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CONVERSER: Few-Shot Conversational Dense Retrieval with Synthetic Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06748/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-domain question answering (OpenQA) is an important branch of textual QA which discovers answers for the given questions based on a large number of unstructured documents. Effectively mining correct answers from the open-domain sources still has a fair way to go. Existing OpenQA systems might suffer from the issues of question complexity and ambiguity, as well as insufficient background knowledge. Recently, conversational OpenQA is proposed to address these issues with the abundant contextual information in the conversation. Promising as it might be, there exist several fundamental limitations including the inaccurate question understanding, the coarse ranking for passage selection, and the inconsistent usage of golden passage in the training and inference phases. To alleviate these limitations, in this paper, we propose a framework with Multifaceted Improvements for Conversational open-domain Question Answering (MICQA). Specifically, MICQA has three significant advantages. First, the proposed KL-divergence based regularization is able to lead to a better question understanding for retrieval and answer reading. Second, the added post-ranker module can push more relevant passages to the top placements and be selected for reader with a two-aspect constrains. Third, the well designed curriculum learning strategy effectively narrows the gap between the golden passage settings of training and inference, and encourages the reader to find true answer without the golden passage assistance. Extensive experiments conducted on the publicly available dataset OR-QuAC demonstrate the superiority of MICQA over the state-of-the-art model in conversational OpenQA task.