1. Exploring Language Model Generalization in Low-Resource Extractive QA
- Author
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Sengupta, Saptarshi, Yin, Wenpeng, Nakov, Preslav, Ghosh, Shreya, and Wang, Suhang
- Subjects
Computer Science - Computation and Language - Abstract
In this paper, we investigate Extractive Question Answering (EQA) with Large Language Models (LLMs) under domain drift, i.e., can LLMs generalize well to closed-domains that require specific knowledge such as medicine and law in a zero-shot fashion without additional in-domain training? To this end, we devise a series of experiments to empirically explain the performance gap. Our findings suggest that: a) LLMs struggle with dataset demands of closed-domains such as retrieving long answer-spans; b) Certain LLMs, despite showing strong overall performance, display weaknesses in meeting basic requirements as discriminating between domain-specific senses of words which we link to pre-processing decisions; c) Scaling model parameters is not always effective for cross-domain generalization; and d) Closed-domain datasets are quantitatively much different than open-domain EQA datasets and current LLMs struggle to deal with them. Our findings point out important directions for improving existing LLMs.
- Published
- 2024