Are You Smarter Than a Sixth Grader? Textbook Question Answering for Multimodal Machine Comprehension

Aniruddha Kembhavi, Minjoon Seo, Dustin Schwenk, Jonghyun Choi, Ali Farhadi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, pp. 4999-5007

Abstract


We introduce the task of Multi-Modal Machine Comprehension (M3C), which aims at answering multimodal questions given a context of text, diagrams and images. We present the Textbook Question Answering (TQA) dataset that includes 1,076 lessons and 26,260 multi-modal questions, taken from middle school science curricula. Our analysis shows that a significant portion of questions require complex parsing of the text and the diagrams and reasoning, indicating that our dataset is more complex compared to previous machine comprehension and visual question answering datasets. We extend state-of-the-art methods for textual machine comprehension and visual question answering to the TQA dataset. Our experiments show that these models do not perform well on TQA. The presented dataset opens new challenges for research in question answering and reasoning across multiple modalities.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Kembhavi_2017_CVPR,
author = {Kembhavi, Aniruddha and Seo, Minjoon and Schwenk, Dustin and Choi, Jonghyun and Farhadi, Ali and Hajishirzi, Hannaneh},
title = {Are You Smarter Than a Sixth Grader? Textbook Question Answering for Multimodal Machine Comprehension},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
month = {July},
year = {2017}
}