Papers › Evaluating Theory of Mind in Question Answering

Evaluating Theory of Mind in Question Answering

28 Aug 2018EMNLP 2018 10arXiv:1808.09352archive 2025-07-28

Aida Nematzadeh, Kaylee Burns, Erin Grant, Alison Gopnik, Thomas L. Griffiths

We propose a new dataset for evaluating question answering models with respect to their capacity to reason about beliefs. Our tasks are inspired by theory-of-mind experiments that examine whether children are able to reason about the beliefs of others, in particular when those beliefs differ from reality. We evaluate a number of recent neural models with memory augmentation. We find that all fail on our tasks, which require keeping track of inconsistent states of the world; moreover, the models' accuracy decreases notably when random sentences are introduced to the tasks at test.

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