Beat the AI: Investigating Adversarial Human Annotations for Reading Comprehension

Innovations in annotation methodology have been a propellant for Reading Comprehension (RC) datasets and models. One recent trend to challenge current RC models is to involve a model in the annotation process: humans create questions adversarially, such that the model fails to answer them correctly. In this work we investigate this annotation approach and apply it in three different settings, collecting a total of 36,000 samples with progressively stronger models in the annotation loop. This allows us to explore questions such as the reproducibility of the adversarial effect, transfer from data collected with varying model-in-the-loop strengths, and generalisation to data collected without a model. We find that training on adversarially collected samples leads to strong generalisation to non-adversarially collected datasets, yet with progressive deterioration as the model-in-the-loop strength increases. Furthermore we find that stronger models can still learn from datasets collected with substantially weaker models in the loop: When trained on data collected with a BiDAF model in the loop, RoBERTa achieves 36.0F1 on questions that it cannot answer when trained on SQuAD - only marginally lower than when trained on data collected using RoBERTa itself.