Ensembling Strategies for Answering Natural Questions

Abstract: Many of the top question answering systems today utilize ensembling to improve their performance on tasks such as the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) and Natural Questions (NQ) challenges. Unfortunately most of these systems do not publish their ensembling strategies used in their leaderboard submissions. In this work, we investigate a number of ensembling techniques and demonstrate a strategy which improves our F1 score for short answers on the dev set for NQ by 2.3 F1 points over our single model (which outperforms the previous SOTA by 1.9 F1 points).