Few-Shot Data Synthesis for Open Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering

Few-shot learning for open domain multi-hop question answering typically relies on the incontext learning capability of large language models (LLMs). While powerful, these LLMs usually contain tens or hundreds of billions of parameters, making them rather inefficient at inference time. To improve performance of smaller language models, we propose a data synthesis framework for multi-hop question answering that requires less than 10 human annotated question answer pairs. Our framework depends only on rich, naturally-occurring relationships among documents and is built upon the data generation functions parameterized by LLMs and prompts. We synthesize millions of multi-hop questions and claims to finetune language models, evaluated on popular benchmarks for multi-hop question answering and fact verification. Empirically, our approach improves model performance significantly, allowing the finetuned models to be competitive with GPT-3.5 based approaches while being almost one-third the size in parameter count.

Mingda Chen, Xilun Chen, Wen-tau Yih · 2023