Papers › Two is Better than Many? Binary Classification as an Effective Approach to...
Two is Better than Many? Binary Classification as an Effective Approach to Multi-Choice Question Answering
Deepanway Ghosal, Navonil Majumder, Rada Mihalcea, Soujanya Poria
We propose a simple refactoring of multi-choice question answering (MCQA) tasks as a series of binary classifications. The MCQA task is generally performed by scoring each (question, answer) pair normalized over all the pairs, and then selecting the answer from the pair that yield the highest score. For n answer choices, this is equivalent to an n-class classification setup where only one class (true answer) is correct. We instead show that classifying (question, true answer) as positive instances and (question, false answer) as negative instances is significantly more effective across various models and datasets. We show the efficacy of our proposed approach in different tasks -- abductive reasoning, commonsense question answering, science question answering, and sentence completion. Our DeBERTa binary classification model reaches the top or close to the top performance on public leaderboards for these tasks. The source code of the proposed approach is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/TEAM.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2210.16495")
Code
Syntology Ran 1 of 7 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 6 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran with no contract checked.
By repository: official repository: 7 samples from 1 repository, 1 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
7 samples harvested; 1 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 6 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
Licence: 0 of the 7 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.
Harvested from declare-lab/TEAM. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.
Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.
Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.
4dab6811065fbe1c · report
25695845c448eef9 · report
eedd86173a2d52d7 · report
5d544b01234bdcee · report
6b021e1d8b19988c · report
ffc49c4218a2e155 · report
83ef42f1f5c80dc5 · report
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Question Answering | PIQA | DeBERTa-Large 304M | Accuracy | 87.4 | #5 of 67 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | PIQA | DeBERTa-Large 304M (classification-based) | Accuracy | 85.9 | #9 of 67 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | SIQA | DeBERTa-Large 304M | Accuracy | 80.2 | #6 of 24 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | SIQA | DeBERTa-Large 304M (classification-based) | Accuracy | 79.9 | #7 of 24 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Sentence Completion | HellaSwag | DeBERTa-Large 304M (classification-based) | Accuracy | 95.6 | #3 of 89 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Sentence Completion | HellaSwag | DeBERTa-Large 304M | Accuracy | 94.7 | #6 of 89 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections