# Detrimental Contexts in Open-Domain Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.18077 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18077/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03299/) (2022)
- [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)
- [KILT: a Benchmark for Knowledge Intensive Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02252/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Relation Extraction via Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04115/) (2017)
- [Autoregressive Entity Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00904/) (2020)
- [Generate rather than Retrieve: Large Language Models are Strong Context Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10063/) (2022)
- [Distilling Knowledge from Reader to Retriever for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04584/) (2020)
- [HoVer: A Dataset for Many-Hop Fact Extraction And Claim Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03088/) (2020)
- [Autoregressive Search Engines: Generating Substrings as Document Identifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10628/) (2022)
- [FiD-Light: Efficient and Effective Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14290/) (2022)
- [ProoFVer: Natural Logic Theorem Proving for Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11357/) (2021)
- [Evidentiality-guided Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08688/) (2021)
- [FiDO: Fusion-in-Decoder optimized for stronger performance and faster inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08153/) (2022)
- [Improving Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Data Importance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03027/) (2023)
- [Attention-guided Generative Models for Extractive Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06393/) (2021)
- [RECONSIDER: Re-Ranking using Span-Focused Cross-Attention for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10757/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For knowledge intensive NLP tasks, it has been widely accepted that accessing more information is a contributing factor to improvements in the model's end-to-end performance. However, counter-intuitively, too much context can have a negative impact on the model when evaluated on common question answering (QA) datasets. In this paper, we analyze how passages can have a detrimental effect on retrieve-then-read architectures used in question answering. Our empirical evidence indicates that the current read architecture does not fully leverage the retrieved passages and significantly degrades its performance when using the whole passages compared to utilizing subsets of them. Our findings demonstrate that model accuracy can be improved by 10% on two popular QA datasets by filtering out detrimental passages. Additionally, these outcomes are attained by utilizing existing retrieval methods without further training or data. We further highlight the challenges associated with identifying the detrimental passages. First, even with the correct context, the model can make an incorrect prediction, posing a challenge in determining which passages are most influential. Second, evaluation typically considers lexical matching, which is not robust to variations of correct answers. Despite these limitations, our experimental results underscore the pivotal role of identifying and removing these detrimental passages for the context-efficient retrieve-then-read pipeline. Code and data are available at https://github.com/xfactlab/emnlp2023-damaging-retrieval