# XAIQA: Explainer-Based Data Augmentation for Extractive Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03567 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03567/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Publicly Available Clinical BERT Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03323/) (2019)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [Explainable Prediction of Medical Codes from Clinical Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05695/) (2018)
- [Large Language Models are Few-Shot Clinical Information Extractors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12689/) (2022)
- [Synthetic QA Corpora Generation with Roundtrip Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05416/) (2019)
- [emrQA: A Large Corpus for Question Answering on Electronic Medical Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00732/) (2018)
- [Clinical-Longformer and Clinical-BigBird: Transformers for long clinical sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11838/) (2022)
- [Code Synonyms Do Matter: Multiple Synonyms Matching Network for Automatic ICD Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01515/) (2022)
- [Inferring Degrees from Incomplete Networks and Nonlinear Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10546/) (2020)
- [CliniQG4QA: Generating Diverse Questions for Domain Adaptation of Clinical Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16021/) (2020)
- [Learning to Ask Like a Physician](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02696/) (2022)
- [Can Question Generation Debias Question Answering Models? A Case Study on Question-Context Lexical Overlap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11256/) (2021)
- [SPBERTQA: A Two-Stage Question Answering System Based on Sentence Transformers for Medical Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09600/) (2022)
- [Extend and Explain: Interpreting Very Long Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01174/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Extractive question answering (QA) systems can enable physicians and researchers to query medical records, a foundational capability for designing clinical studies and understanding patient medical history. However, building these systems typically requires expert-annotated QA pairs. Large language models (LLMs), which can perform extractive QA, depend on high quality data in their prompts, specialized for the application domain. We introduce a novel approach, XAIQA, for generating synthetic QA pairs at scale from data naturally available in electronic health records. Our method uses the idea of a classification model explainer to generate questions and answers about medical concepts corresponding to medical codes. In an expert evaluation with two physicians, our method identifies 2.2× more semantic matches and 3.8× more clinical abbreviations than two popular approaches that use sentence transformers to create QA pairs. In an ML evaluation, adding our QA pairs improves performance of GPT-4 as an extractive QA model, including on difficult questions. In both the expert and ML evaluations, we examine trade-offs between our method and sentence transformers for QA pair generation depending on question difficulty.