UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA System

Understand

Question answering (QA) tasks have been posed using a variety of formats, such as extractive span selection, multiple choice, etc.

• This has led to format-specialized models, and even to an implicit division in the QA community.
• We argue that such boundaries are artificial and perhaps unnecessary, given the reasoning abilities we seek to teach are not governed by the format.
• As evidence, we use the latest advances in language modeling to build a single pre-trained QA model, UnifiedQA, that performs surprisingly well across 17 QA datasets spanning 4 diverse formats.