Retrieval Enhanced Data Augmentation for Question Answering on Privacy Policies

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Prior studies in privacy policies frame the question answering (QA) tasks as identifying the most relevant text segment or a list of sentences from the policy document for a user query. However, annotating such a dataset is challenging as it requires specific domain expertise (e.g., law academics). Even if we manage a small-scale one, a bottleneck that remains is that the labeled data are heavily imbalanced (only a few segments are relevant) - limiting the gain in this domain. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a novel data augmentation framework based on ensembling retriever models that captures the relevant text segments from unlabeled policy documents and expand the positive examples in the training set. In addition, to improve the diversity and quality of the augmented data, we leverage multiple pre-trained language models (LMs) and cascaded them with noise reduction oracles. Using our augmented data on the PrivacyQA benchmark, we elevate the existing baseline by a large margin (10% F1) and achieve a new state-of-the-art F1 score of 50%. Our ablation studies provide further insights into the effectiveness of our approach.