Time-Aware Representation Learning for Time-Sensitive Question Answering
Jungbin Son Alice Oh
Time is one of the crucial factors in real-world question answering (QA)
problems. However, language models have difficulty understanding the
relationships between time specifiers, such as 'after' and 'before', and
numbers, since existing QA datasets do not include sufficient time expressions.
To address this issue, we propose a Time-Context aware Question Answering
(TCQA) framework. We suggest a Time-Context dependent Span Extraction (TCSE)
task, and build a time-context dependent data generation framework for model
training. Moreover, we present a metric to evaluate the time awareness of the
QA model using TCSE. The TCSE task consists of a question and four sentence
candidates classified as correct or incorrect based on time and context. The
model is trained to extract the answer span from the sentence that is both
correct in time and context. The model trained with TCQA outperforms baseline
models up to 8.5 of the F1-score in the TimeQA dataset. Our dataset and code
are available at https://github.com/sonjbin/TCQA