Papers › SPARTQA: A Textual Question Answering Benchmark for Spatial Reasoning

SPARTQA: A Textual Question Answering Benchmark for Spatial Reasoning

1 Jun 2021NAACL 2021 4archive 2025-07-28

Roshanak Mirzaee, Hossein Rajaby Faghihi, Qiang Ning, Parisa Kordjamshidi

This paper proposes a question-answering (QA) benchmark for spatial reasoning on natural language text which contains more realistic spatial phenomena not covered by prior work and is challenging for state-of-the-art language models (LM). We propose a distant supervision method to improve on this task. Specifically, we design grammar and reasoning rules to automatically generate a spatial description of visual scenes and corresponding QA pairs. Experiments show that further pretraining LMs on these automatically generated data significantly improves LMs{'} capability on spatial understanding, which in turn helps to better solve two external datasets, bAbI, and boolQ. We hope that this work can foster investigations into more sophisticated models for spatial reasoning over text.

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HLR/SpartQA-baselines officialmentioned in paperpytorch report
HLR/SpartQA_generation mentioned in paperMIT report

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Question AnsweringSpatial Reasoning

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