Exploring How AI Answering Models Understand and Respond in Context.

Abstract

Abstract: Question answering (QA) is an important capability for artificial intelligence systems to assist humans by providing relevant information. In recent years, large pretrained language models like BERT and GPT have shown promising results on QA tasks. This paper explores how two state-of-the-art models, BERT and GPT-4, understand questions and generate answers in conversational contexts. We first provide an overview of the architectures and pretrained objectives of both models. Then we conduct experiments on two QA datasets to evaluate each model's ability to reason about questions, leverage context and background knowledge, and provide natural and logically consistent responses. Quantitative results reveal the strengths and weaknesses of each model, with BERT demonstrating stronger reasoning abilities but GPT-4 generating more human-like responses. Through qualitative error analysis, we identify cases where each model fails and propose explanations grounded in their underlying architectures and pretraining approaches. This analysis provides insights into the current capabilities and limitations of large pretrained models for open-domain conversational QA. The results suggest directions for improving both types of models, including combining their complementary strengths, increasing reasoning ability, and incorporating more conversational context. This work highlights important considerations in developing AI systems that can intelligently understand and respond to natural language questions.