Events Calendar

NL Seminar- CoQA, A Conversational Question Answering Challenge

Speaker: Siva Reddy , Stanford University

Talk Title: CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge

Series: Natural Language Seminar

Abstract: Humans gather information by engaging in conversations involving a series of interconnected questions and answers. For machines to assist in information gathering, it is therefore essential to enable them to answer conversational questions. In this talk, I will present our work on CoQA, a novel dataset for building Conversational Question Answering systems. CoQA contains 127k questions with answers, obtained from 8k conversations about text passages from seven diverse domains. The questions are conversational, and the answers are free-form text with their corresponding evidence highlighted in the passage. We analyze CoQA in depth and show that conversational questions have challenging phenomena not present in existing reading comprehension datasets, e.g., coreference and pragmatic reasoning. We evaluate strong conversational and reading comprehension models on CoQA. The best system obtains an F1 score of 65.1%, which is 23.7 points behind human performance 88.8 percent, indicating there is ample room for improvement. We launch CoQA as a challenge to the community. See link below.




Biography: Siva Reddy is a postdoc in Computer Science at Stanford University working with Prof. Christopher Manning. His research focuses on enabling natural communication between humans and machines. Prior to the postdoc, he was a Google PhD Fellow at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Prof. Mirella Lapata and Prof. Mark Steedman.

Host: Xusen Yin

More Info: https://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/

Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/s/iHu_F/

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Floor Conf Rm-CR# 689

WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/iHu_F/

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar

Event Link: https://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/