In plain words: Instead of waiting for another customer to answer a product question, a system searches the product's reviews for the relevant ones and writes an answer from them. The team collected 923,000 real questions with reviews and answers, and found today's models still struggle.
Abstract
Every day, thousands of customers post questions on Amazon product pages. After some time, if they are fortunate, a knowledgeable customer might answer their question. Observing that many questions can be answered based upon the available product reviews, we propose the task of review-based QA. Given a corpus of reviews and a question, the QA system synthesizes an answer. To this end, we introduce a new dataset and propose a method that combines information retrieval techniques for selecting relevant reviews (given a question) and "reading comprehension" models for synthesizing an answer (given a question and review). Our dataset consists of 923k questions, 3.6M answers and 14M reviews across 156k products. Building on the well-known Amazon dataset, we collect additional annotations, marking each question as either answerable or unanswerable based on the available reviews. A deployed system could first classify a question as answerable and then attempt to generate an answer. Notably, unlike many popular QA datasets, here, the questions, passages, and answers are all extracted from real human interactions. We evaluate numerous models for answer generation and propose strong baselines, demonstrating the challenging nature of this new task.
Mansi Gupta, Nitish Kulkarni, Raghuveer Chanda, Anirudha Rayasam, Zachary C Lipton
arXiv:1908.04364 · cs.CL, cs.IR · submitted Aug 12, 2019 · updated Aug 20, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · 8 pages, 7 figures; IJCAI-19; first three authors contribute equally. Data and code available at https://github.com/amazonqa/amazonqa