Overinformative Question Answering by Humans and Machines
Polina Tsvilodub Michael Franke Robert D. Hawkins Noah D. Goodman
When faced with a polar question, speakers often provide overinformative
answers going beyond a simple "yes" or "no". But what principles guide the
selection of additional information? In this paper, we provide experimental
evidence from two studies suggesting that overinformativeness in human
answering is driven by considerations of relevance to the questioner's goals
which they flexibly adjust given the functional context in which the question
is uttered. We take these human results as a strong benchmark for investigating
question-answering performance in state-of-the-art neural language models,
conducting an extensive evaluation on items from human experiments. We find
that most models fail to adjust their answering behavior in a human-like way
and tend to include irrelevant information. We show that GPT-3 is highly
sensitive to the form of the prompt and only achieves human-like answer
patterns when guided by an example and cognitively-motivated explanation.