Open-Domain Conversational Question Answering with Historical Answers

Abstract: Open-domain conversational question answering can be viewed as two tasks: passage retrieval and conversational question answering, where the former relies on selecting candidate passages from a large corpus and the latter requires better understanding of a question with contexts to predict the answers. This paper proposes ConvADR-QA that leverages historical answers to boost retrieval performance and further achieves better answering performance. In our proposed framework, the retrievers use a teacher-student framework to reduce noises from previous turns. Our experiments on the benchmark dataset, OR-QuAC, demonstrate that our model outperforms existing baselines in both extractive and generative reader settings, well justifying the effectiveness of historical answers for open-domain conversational question answering.