TRAVELER provides a synthetic temporal question-answering benchmark and evaluation showing that LLM accuracy degrades from explicit to implicit to vague temporal references and as event-set length increases.
Faithful Temporal Question Answering over Heterogeneous Sources
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abstract
Temporal question answering (QA) involves time constraints, with phrases such as "... in 2019" or "... before COVID". In the former, time is an explicit condition, in the latter it is implicit. State-of-the-art methods have limitations along three dimensions. First, with neural inference, time constraints are merely soft-matched, giving room to invalid or inexplicable answers. Second, questions with implicit time are poorly supported. Third, answers come from a single source: either a knowledge base (KB) or a text corpus. We propose a temporal QA system that addresses these shortcomings. First, it enforces temporal constraints for faithful answering with tangible evidence. Second, it properly handles implicit questions. Third, it operates over heterogeneous sources, covering KB, text and web tables in a unified manner. The method has three stages: (i) understanding the question and its temporal conditions, (ii) retrieving evidence from all sources, and (iii) faithfully answering the question. As implicit questions are sparse in prior benchmarks, we introduce a principled method for generating diverse questions. Experiments show superior performance over a suite of baselines.
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TRAVELER: A Benchmark for Evaluating Temporal Reasoning across Vague, Implicit and Explicit References
TRAVELER provides a synthetic temporal question-answering benchmark and evaluation showing that LLM accuracy degrades from explicit to implicit to vague temporal references and as event-set length increases.