Google Research Paper Reveals a Shortcoming in Search
https://www.searchenginejournal.comA recent Google research paper on Long Form Question Answering (LFQA) (pdf) illustrates how difficult it is to answer questions that need longer and nuanced answers. While the researchers were able to improve the state of the art of this kind of question answering, they also admitted that their results needed significant improvements.
Questions like “What’s the phone number of XYZ store?” is an example of a typical question that search engines are good at answering, especially because the answer is objective and not subjective.
Long Form Question Answering is harder because the questions demand answers in the form of paragraphs, not short texts.
The research paper concludes by stating that its approach to solving this task “achieves state of the art performance” but that there are still issues to resolve and more research that needs to be done.
