Evidence Aggregation for Answer Re-Ranking in Open-Domain Question Answering
Very recently, it comes to be a popular approach for answering open-domain questions by first searching question-related passages, then applying reading comprehension models to extract answers. Existing works usually extract answers from single passages independently, thus not fully make use of the multiple searched passages, especially for the some questions requiring several evidences, which can appear in different passages, to be answered. The above observations raise the problem of evidence aggregation from multiple passages. In this paper, we deal with this problem as answer re-ranking. Specifically, based on the answer candidates generated from the existing state-of-the-art QA model, we propose two different re-ranking methods, strength-based and coverage-based re-rankers, which make use of the aggregated evidences from different passages to help entail the ground-truth answer for the question. Our model achieved state-of-the-arts on three public open-domain QA datasets, Quasar-T, SearchQA and the open-domain version of TriviaQA, with about 8\% improvement on the former two datasets.
 The paper is clear, although there are many English mistakes (that should be corrected). The proposed method aggregates answers from multiple passages in the context of QA. The new method is motivated well and departs from prior work. Experiments on three datasets show the proposed method to be notably better than several baselines (although two of the baselines, GA and BiDAF, appear tremendously weak). The analysis of the results is interesting and largely convincing, although a more dedicated error analysis or discussion of the limitation of the proposed approach would be welcome. Minor point: in the description of Quasar-T, the IR model is described as lucene index. An index is not an IR model. Lucene is an IR system that implements various IR models. The terminology should be corrected here.
You are a member of the scientific community tasked with peer review. Review the following paper title and abstract.
### Title + Abstract
Evidence Aggregation for Answer Re-Ranking in Open-Domain Question Answering
Very recently, it comes to be a popular approach for answering open-domain questions by first searching question-related passages, then applying reading comprehension models to extract answers. Existing works usually extract answers from single passages independently, thus not fully make use of the multiple searched passages, especially for the some questions requiring several evidences, which can appear in different passages, to be answered. The above observations raise the problem of evidence aggregation from multiple passages. In this paper, we deal with this problem as answer re-ranking. Specifically, based on the answer candidates generated from the existing state-of-the-art QA model, we propose two different re-ranking methods, strength-based and coverage-based re-rankers, which make use of the aggregated evidences from different passages to help entail the ground-truth answer for the question. Our model achieved state-of-the-arts on three public open-domain QA datasets, Quasar-T, SearchQA and the open-domain version of TriviaQA, with about 8\% improvement on the former two datasets.
user
<think>Okay, to do a decent peer review, I should start with summarizing what the work is about. This includes novelty, contributions, clarity, and impact. I might include suggestions to issues that I find critical to the usefulness of the work. Starting with novelty, there are different types of novelty. The first aspect of novelty is scope and scale. Is the work covering a broader perspective than previous works? The second aspect is methodology. Is the proposed methodology novel compared to previous methods? Do they provide any significant advantage over previous methodologies? The third aspect is results. Are the results different compared previous work? Does this lead to any novel theories or an extension of current theories? Next is clarity, I will be reading the work in depth and analyze if any sentences can be potentially ambiguous or misleading. If any sentences are ambiguous, I will state them and give a suggestion on how to rephrase such sentence or how to make more clear to the audience. Lastly, impact is important. I will attempt to predict how such work will impact the scientific community. This might include the applications of such work and how the work might transform the way we study a certain topic. Finally, I will might only mention issues that are critical. This is to keep the review as concise and helpful as possible.</think>



 The paper is clear, although there are many English mistakes (that should be corrected). The proposed method aggregates answers from multiple passages in the context of QA. The new method is motivated well and departs from prior work. Experiments on three datasets show the proposed method to be notably better than several baselines (although two of the baselines, GA and BiDAF, appear tremendously weak). The analysis of the results is interesting and largely convincing, although a more dedicated error analysis or discussion of the limitation of the proposed approach would be welcome. Minor point: in the description of Quasar-T, the IR model is described as lucene index. An index is not an IR model. Lucene is an IR system that implements various IR models. The terminology should be corrected here.
assistant
 The paper is clear, although there are many English mistakes (that should be corrected). The proposed method aggregates answers from multiple passages in the context of QA. The new method is motivated well and departs from prior work. Experiments on three datasets show the proposed method to be notably better than several baselines (although two of the baselines, GA and BiDAF, appear tremendously weak). The analysis of the results is interesting and largely convincing, although a more dedicated error analysis or discussion of the limitation of the proposed approach would be welcome. Minor point: in the description of Quasar-T, the IR model is described as lucene index. An index is not an IR model. Lucene is an IR system that implements various IR models. The terminology should be corrected here.