scholarly journals Read + Verify: Machine Reading Comprehension with Unanswerable Questions

Author(s):  
Minghao Hu ◽  
Furu Wei ◽  
Yuxing Peng ◽  
Zhen Huang ◽  
Nan Yang ◽  
...  

Machine reading comprehension with unanswerable questions aims to abstain from answering when no answer can be inferred. In addition to extract answers, previous works usually predict an additional “no-answer” probability to detect unanswerable cases. However, they fail to validate the answerability of the question by verifying the legitimacy of the predicted answer. To address this problem, we propose a novel read-then-verify system, which not only utilizes a neural reader to extract candidate answers and produce no-answer probabilities, but also leverages an answer verifier to decide whether the predicted answer is entailed by the input snippets. Moreover, we introduce two auxiliary losses to help the reader better handle answer extraction as well as no-answer detection, and investigate three different architectures for the answer verifier. Our experiments on the SQuAD 2.0 dataset show that our system obtains a score of 74.2 F1 on test set, achieving state-of-the-art results at the time of submission (Aug. 28th, 2018).

Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 322
Author(s):  
Junjie Zeng ◽  
Xiaoya Sun ◽  
Qi Zhang ◽  
Xinmeng Li

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) research concerns how to endow machines with the ability to understand given passages and answer questions, which is a challenging problem in the field of natural language processing. To solve the Chinese MRC task efficiently, this paper proposes an Improved Extraction-based Reading Comprehension method with Answer Re-ranking (IERC-AR), consisting of a candidate answer extraction module and a re-ranking module. The candidate answer extraction module uses an improved pre-training language model, RoBERTa-WWM, to generate precise word representations, which can solve the problem of polysemy and is good for capturing Chinese word-level features. The re-ranking module re-evaluates candidate answers based on a self-attention mechanism, which can improve the accuracy of predicting answers. Traditional machine-reading methods generally integrate different modules into a pipeline system, which leads to re-encoding problems and inconsistent data distribution between the training and testing phases; therefore, this paper proposes an end-to-end model architecture for IERC-AR to reasonably integrate the candidate answer extraction and re-ranking modules. The experimental results on the Les MMRC dataset show that IERC-AR outperforms state-of-the-art MRC approaches.


Author(s):  
Zhipeng Chen ◽  
Yiming Cui ◽  
Wentao Ma ◽  
Shijin Wang ◽  
Guoping Hu

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) with multiplechoice questions requires the machine to read given passage and select the correct answer among several candidates. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Convolutional Spatial Attention (CSA) model which can better handle the MRC with multiple-choice questions. The proposed model could fully extract the mutual information among the passage, question, and the candidates, to form the enriched representations. Furthermore, to merge various attention results, we propose to use convolutional operation to dynamically summarize the attention values within the different size of regions. Experimental results show that the proposed model could give substantial improvements over various state-of- the-art systems on both RACE and SemEval-2018 Task11 datasets.


Author(s):  
Ming Yan ◽  
Jiangnan Xia ◽  
Chen Wu ◽  
Bin Bi ◽  
Zhongzhou Zhao ◽  
...  

A fundamental trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency needs to be balanced when designing an online question answering system. Effectiveness comes from sophisticated functions such as extractive machine reading comprehension (MRC), while efficiency is obtained from improvements in preliminary retrieval components such as candidate document selection and paragraph ranking. Given the complexity of the real-world multi-document MRC scenario, it is difficult to jointly optimize both in an end-to-end system. To address this problem, we develop a novel deep cascade learning model, which progressively evolves from the documentlevel and paragraph-level ranking of candidate texts to more precise answer extraction with machine reading comprehension. Specifically, irrelevant documents and paragraphs are first filtered out with simple functions for efficiency consideration. Then we jointly train three modules on the remaining texts for better tracking the answer: the document extraction, the paragraph extraction and the answer extraction. Experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on two large-scale multidocument benchmark datasets, i.e., TriviaQA and DuReader. In addition, our online system can stably serve typical scenarios with millions of daily requests in less than 50ms.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (01n02) ◽  
pp. 1950010
Author(s):  
Liguo Duan ◽  
Jianying Gao ◽  
Aiping Li

The Multi-choice machine reading comprehension, selecting the correct answer in the candidate answers, requires obtaining the interaction semantics between the given passage and the question. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning model. It employs Bi-GRU to contextually encode passages and question, and specifically models complex interactions between the given passage and the question by six kinds of attention functions, including the concatenated attention, the bilinear attention, the element-wise dot attention, minus attention and bi-directional attentions of Query2Context, Context2Query. Then, we use the multi-level attention transfer reasoning mechanism to focus on further obtaining more accurate comprehensive semantics. To demonstrate the validity of our model, we performed experiments on the large reading comprehension data set RACE. The experimental results show that our model surpasses many state-of-the-art systems on the RACE data set and has good reasoning ability.


Author(s):  
Min Tang ◽  
Jiaran Cai ◽  
Hankz Hankui Zhuo

Multiple-choice machine reading comprehension is an important and challenging task where the machine is required to select the correct answer from a set of candidate answers given passage and question. Existing approaches either match extracted evidence with candidate answers shallowly or model passage, question and candidate answers with a single paradigm of matching. In this paper, we propose Multi-Matching Network (MMN) which models the semantic relationship among passage, question and candidate answers from multiple different paradigms of matching. In our MMN model, each paradigm is inspired by how human think and designed under a unified compose-match framework. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we evaluate MMN on a large-scale multiple choice machine reading comprehension dataset (i.e. RACE). Empirical results show that our proposed model achieves a significant improvement compared to strong baselines and obtains state-of-the-art results.


Author(s):  
Minghao Hu ◽  
Yuxing Peng ◽  
Zhen Huang ◽  
Xipeng Qiu ◽  
Furu Wei ◽  
...  

In this paper, we introduce the Reinforced Mnemonic Reader for machine reading comprehension tasks, which enhances previous attentive readers in two aspects. First, a reattention mechanism is proposed to refine current attentions by directly accessing to past attentions that are temporally memorized in a multi-round alignment architecture, so as to avoid the problems of attention redundancy and attention deficiency. Second, a new optimization approach, called dynamic-critical reinforcement learning, is introduced to extend the standard supervised method. It always encourages to predict a more acceptable answer so as to address the convergence suppression problem occurred in traditional reinforcement learning algorithms. Extensive experiments on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results. Meanwhile, our model outperforms previous systems by over 6% in terms of both Exact Match and F1 metrics on two adversarial SQuAD datasets.


Author(s):  
Bin Wang ◽  
Xuejie Zhang ◽  
Xiaobing Zhou ◽  
Junyi Li

The machine comprehension research of clinical medicine has great potential value in practical application, but it has not received sufficient attention and many existing models are very time consuming for the cloze-style machine reading comprehension. In this paper, we study the cloze-style machine reading comprehension in the clinical medical field and propose a Gated Dilated Convolution with Attention (GDCA) model, which consists of a gated dilated convolution module and an attention mechanism. Our model has high parallelism and is capable of capturing long-distance dependencies. On the CliCR data set, our model surpasses the present best model on several metrics and obtains state-of-the-art result, and the training speed is 8 times faster than that of the best model.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Kiet Van Nguyen ◽  
Nhat Duy Nguyen ◽  
Phong Nguyen-Thuan Do ◽  
Anh Gia-Tuan Nguyen ◽  
Ngan Luu-Thuy Nguyen

Machine Reading Comprehension has attracted significant interest in research on natural language understanding, and large-scale datasets and neural network-based methods have been developed for this task. However, most developments of resources and methods in machine reading comprehension have been investigated using two resource-rich languages, English and Chinese. This article proposes a system called ViReader for open-domain machine reading comprehension in Vietnamese by using Wikipedia as the textual knowledge source, where the answer to any particular question is a textual span derived directly from texts on Vietnamese Wikipedia. Our system combines a sentence retriever component, based on techniques of information retrieval to extract the relevant sentences, with a transfer learning-based answer extractor trained to predict answers based on Wikipedia texts. Experiments on multiple datasets for machine reading comprehension in Vietnamese and other languages demonstrate that (1) our ViReader system is highly competitive with prevalent machine learning-based systems, and (2) multi-task learning by using a combination consisting of the sentence retriever and answer extractor is an end-to-end reading comprehension system. The sentence retriever component of our proposed system retrieves the sentences that are most likely to provide the answer response to the given question. The transfer learning-based answer extractor then reads the document from which the sentences have been retrieved, predicts the answer, and returns it to the user. The ViReader system achieves new state-of-the-art performances, with values of 70.83% EM (exact match) and 89.54% F1, outperforming the BERT-based system by 11.55% and 9.54% , respectively. It also obtains state-of-the-art performance on UIT-ViNewsQA (another Vietnamese dataset consisting of online health-domain news) and BiPaR (a bilingual dataset on English and Chinese novel texts). Compared with the BERT-based system, our system achieves significant improvements (in terms of F1) with 7.65% for English and 6.13% for Chinese on the BiPaR dataset. Furthermore, we build a ViReader application programming interface that programmers can employ in Artificial Intelligence applications.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 8392-8400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Liu ◽  
Xin Liu ◽  
An Yang ◽  
Jing Liu ◽  
Jinsong Su ◽  
...  

Lacking robustness is a serious problem for Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models. To alleviate this problem, one of the most promising ways is to augment the training dataset with sophisticated designed adversarial examples. Generally, those examples are created by rules according to the observed patterns of successful adversarial attacks. Since the types of adversarial examples are innumerable, it is not adequate to manually design and enrich training data to defend against all types of adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel robust adversarial training approach to improve the robustness of MRC models in a more generic way. Given an MRC model well-trained on the original dataset, our approach dynamically generates adversarial examples based on the parameters of current model and further trains the model by using the generated examples in an iterative schedule. When applied to the state-of-the-art MRC models, including QANET, BERT and ERNIE2.0, our approach obtains significant and comprehensive improvements on 5 adversarial datasets constructed in different ways, without sacrificing the performance on the original SQuAD development set. Moreover, when coupled with other data augmentation strategy, our approach further boosts the overall performance on adversarial datasets and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1955 (1) ◽  
pp. 012072
Author(s):  
Ruiheng Li ◽  
Xuan Zhang ◽  
Chengdong Li ◽  
Zhongju Zheng ◽  
Zihang Zhou ◽  
...  

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