Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions
This addresses the problem of LLMs struggling with dynamic, time-dependent facts in question answering, offering a domain-specific solution for knowledge acquisition tasks.
The paper tackles the challenge of time-sensitive question answering by reframing it as a programming task (QAaP), leveraging LLMs to convert text into structured code for improved reasoning, achieving up to 14.5% improvement over baselines on datasets.
Question answering plays a pivotal role in human daily life because it involves our acquisition of knowledge about the world. However, due to the dynamic and ever-changing nature of real-world facts, the answer can be completely different when the time constraint in the question changes. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering, while our experiments reveal that the aforementioned problems still pose a significant challenge to existing LLMs. This can be attributed to the LLMs' inability to perform rigorous reasoning based on surface-level text semantics. To overcome this limitation, rather than requiring LLMs to directly answer the question, we propose a novel approach where we reframe the $\textbf{Q}$uestion $\textbf{A}$nswering task $\textbf{a}$s $\textbf{P}$rogramming ($\textbf{QAaP}$). Concretely, by leveraging modern LLMs' superior capability in understanding both natural language and programming language, we endeavor to harness LLMs to represent diversely expressed text as well-structured code and select the best matching answer from multiple candidates through programming. We evaluate our QAaP framework on several time-sensitive question answering datasets and achieve decent improvement, up to $14.5$% over strong baselines. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/TianHongZXY/qaap