Elaboration-Generating Commonsense Question Answering at Scale
Wenya Wang, Vivek Srikumar, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Noah A. Smith · 2023
In question answering requiring common sense, language models (e.g., GPT-3) have been used to generate text expressing background knowledge that helps improve performance.Yet the cost of working with such models is very high; in this work, we finetune smaller language models to generate useful intermediate context, referred to here as elaborations.Our framework alternates between updating two language models-an elaboration generator and an answer predictor-allowing each to influence the other.Using less than 0.5% of the parameters of GPT-3, our model outperforms alternatives with similar sizes and closes the gap with GPT-3 on four commonsense question answering benchmarks.Human evaluations show that the quality of the generated elaborations is high. 1