Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions (EMNLP 2023)

Setup

1. pip install -r requirements.txt
2. Set the openai api key in main.py

Quick Start

Run TimeQA experiments

python main.py 
  --prompt_file timeqa.json \
  --given_context 1 \
  --dataset timeqa \
  --data_file test_hard.jsonl \
  --max_slice_length 512 \
  --slice_stride 384 \
  --return_search_passage content \
  --model_name gpt-3.5-turbo \
  --resume_id -1 

Run TempQuestions and TimeQuestions experiments

python main.py 
  --prompt_file timequestions.json \
  --given_context 0 \
  --dataset tempquestion \
  --data_file test.jsonl \
  --max_slice_length 512 \
  --slice_stride 384 \
  --return_search_passage content \
  --model_name gpt-3.5-turbo \
  --resume_id -1 

The output should look like

0 Joachim Löw was the coach of which team between Jan 1997 and Aug 1997?
'''python
query = {"subject": "Joachim Löw", "relation": "coach of", "object": None, "time": {"start": datetime(1997, 1, 1), "end": datetime(1997, 8, 31)}}
answer_key = "object"
'''
Search:
'''python
entities_to_search = ["Joachim Löw"]
'''
--------------------------------------------------
Generate a background document from Wikipedia to answer the given question:Joachim Löw is a German football coach and former player. He was the head coach of VfB Stuttgart from July 1996 to October 1998.
Extract information relevant to the query:
'''python
information.append({"subject": "Joachim Löw", "relation": "coach of", "object": "VfB Stuttgart", "time": {"start": datetime(1996, 7, 1), "end": datetime(1998, 10, 31)}})
'''
**************************************************
Extract information relevant to the query:
'''python
information.append({"subject": "Joachim Löw", "relation": "coach of", "object": None, "time": {"start": datetime(1997, 1, 1), "end": datetime(1997, 8, 31)}})
'''
...

Evaluation

Set the file_path in calc_metrics_with_check_and_match.py and execute it.

How to Generalize to Other Constrained-based Reasoning QA

In this work, we focus on the time-constrained QA. However, our framework can be modified to generalize to other constrained-based QA tasks. The key is to define the constraint as a python class, which should be able to be measured how well the constraint is satisfied and redefine the match function in calc_metrics_with_check_and_match.py.

Note

We run all the experiments with gpt-3.5-turbo-0301. However, we found the updated versions like gpt-3.5-turbo-0613 and gpt-3.5-turbo-1106 have a different behavior, their in-context learning ability become degraded and cannot correctly perform the task.

Citation

Please cite the paper and star this repo if you find QAaP interesting or useful, thank you! Feel free to contact zhuxy21@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn or open an issue if you have any questions.

@article{zhu2023qaap,
  title={Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions},
  author={Zhu, Xinyu and Yang, Cheng and Chen, Bei and Li, Siheng and Lou, Jian-Guang and Yang, Yujiu},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.14221},
  year={2023}
}