Papers › Is a Question Decomposition Unit All We Need?

Is a Question Decomposition Unit All We Need?

25 May 2022arXiv:2205.12538archive 2025-07-28

Pruthvi Patel, Swaroop Mishra, Mihir Parmar, Chitta Baral

Large Language Models (LMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many Natural Language Processing (NLP) benchmarks. With the growing number of new benchmarks, we build bigger and more complex LMs. However, building new LMs may not be an ideal option owing to the cost, time and environmental impact associated with it. We explore an alternative route: can we modify data by expressing it in terms of the model's strengths, so that a question becomes easier for models to answer? We investigate if humans can decompose a hard question into a set of simpler questions that are relatively easier for models to solve. We analyze a range of datasets involving various forms of reasoning and find that it is indeed possible to significantly improve model performance (24% for GPT3 and 29% for RoBERTa-SQuAD along with a symbolic calculator) via decomposition. Our approach provides a viable option to involve people in NLP research in a meaningful way. Our findings indicate that Human-in-the-loop Question Decomposition (HQD) can potentially provide an alternate path to building large LMs. Code and data is available at https://github.com/Pruthvi98/QuestionDecomposition

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