scholarly journals Multi-Matching Network for Multiple Choice Reading Comprehension

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):  
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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (17) ◽  
pp. 7945
Author(s):  
Yu Dai ◽  
Yufan Fu ◽  
Lei Yang

To address the problem of poor semantic reasoning of models in multiple-choice Chinese machine reading comprehension (MRC), this paper proposes an MRC model incorporating multi-granularity semantic reasoning. In this work, we firstly encode articles, questions and candidates to extract global reasoning information; secondly, we use multiple convolution kernels of different sizes to convolve and maximize pooling of the BERT-encoded articles, questions and candidates to extract local semantic reasoning information of different granularities; we then fuse the global information with the local multi-granularity information and use it to make an answer selection. The proposed model can combine the learned multi-granularity semantic information for reasoning, solving the problem of poor semantic reasoning ability of the model, and thus can improve the reasoning ability of machine reading comprehension. The experiments show that the proposed model achieves better performance on the C3 dataset than the benchmark model in semantic reasoning, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed model in semantic reasoning.


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.


Author(s):  
Soham Parikh ◽  
Ananya Sai ◽  
Preksha Nema ◽  
Mitesh Khapra

The task of Reading Comprehension with Multiple Choice Questions, requires a human (or machine) to read a given {passage, question} pair and select one of the n given options. The current state of the art model for this task first computes a question-aware representation for the passage and then selects the option which has the maximum similarity with this representation. However, when humans perform this task they do not just focus on option selection but use a combination of elimination and selection. Specifically, a human would first try to eliminate the most irrelevant option and then read the passage again in the light of this new information (and perhaps ignore portions corresponding to the eliminated option). This process could be repeated multiple times till the reader is finally ready to select the correct option. We propose ElimiNet, a neural network-based model which tries to mimic this process. Specifically, it has gates which decide whether an option can be eliminated given the {passage, question} pair and if so it tries to make the passage representation orthogonal to this eliminated option (akin to ignoring portions of the passage corresponding to the eliminated option). The model makes multiple rounds of partial elimination to refine the passage representation and finally uses a selection module to pick the best option. We evaluate our model on the recently released large scale RACE dataset and show that it outperforms the current state of the art model on 7 out of the 13 question types in this dataset. Further, we show that taking an ensemble of our elimination-selection based method with a selection based method gives us an improvement of 3.1% over the best-reported performance on this dataset.


Author(s):  
Yuanxing Zhang ◽  
Yangbin Zhang ◽  
Kaigui Bian ◽  
Xiaoming Li

Machine reading comprehension has gained attention from both industry and academia. It is a very challenging task that involves various domains such as language comprehension, knowledge inference, summarization, etc. Previous studies mainly focus on reading comprehension on short paragraphs, and these approaches fail to perform well on the documents. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical match attention model to instruct the machine to extract answers from a specific short span of passages for the long document reading comprehension (LDRC) task. The model takes advantages from hierarchical-LSTM to learn the paragraph-level representation, and implements the match mechanism (i.e., quantifying the relationship between two contexts) to find the most appropriate paragraph that includes the hint of answers. Then the task can be decoupled into reading comprehension task for short paragraph, such that the answer can be produced. Experiments on the modified SQuAD dataset show that our proposed model outperforms existing reading comprehension models by at least 20% regarding exact match (EM), F1 and the proportion of identified paragraphs which are exactly the short paragraphs where the original answers locate.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Changchang Zeng ◽  
Shaobo Li

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a challenging natural language processing (NLP) task. It has a wide application potential in the fields of question answering robots, human-computer interactions in mobile virtual reality systems, etc. Recently, the emergence of pretrained models (PTMs) has brought this research field into a new era, in which the training objective plays a key role. The masked language model (MLM) is a self-supervised training objective widely used in various PTMs. With the development of training objectives, many variants of MLM have been proposed, such as whole word masking, entity masking, phrase masking, and span masking. In different MLMs, the length of the masked tokens is different. Similarly, in different machine reading comprehension tasks, the length of the answer is also different, and the answer is often a word, phrase, or sentence. Thus, in MRC tasks with different answer lengths, whether the length of MLM is related to performance is a question worth studying. If this hypothesis is true, it can guide us on how to pretrain the MLM with a relatively suitable mask length distribution for MRC tasks. In this paper, we try to uncover how much of MLM’s success in the machine reading comprehension tasks comes from the correlation between masking length distribution and answer length in the MRC dataset. In order to address this issue, herein, (1) we propose four MRC tasks with different answer length distributions, namely, the short span extraction task, long span extraction task, short multiple-choice cloze task, and long multiple-choice cloze task; (2) four Chinese MRC datasets are created for these tasks; (3) we also have pretrained four masked language models according to the answer length distributions of these datasets; and (4) ablation experiments are conducted on the datasets to verify our hypothesis. The experimental results demonstrate that our hypothesis is true. On four different machine reading comprehension datasets, the performance of the model with correlation length distribution surpasses the model without correlation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (11n12) ◽  
pp. 1727-1740 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongming Zhu ◽  
Yi Luo ◽  
Qin Liu ◽  
Hongfei Fan ◽  
Tianyou Song ◽  
...  

Multistep flow prediction is an essential task for the car-sharing systems. An accurate flow prediction model can help system operators to pre-allocate the cars to meet the demand of users. However, this task is challenging due to the complex spatial and temporal relations among stations. Existing works only considered temporal relations (e.g. using LSTM) or spatial relations (e.g. using CNN) independently. In this paper, we propose an attention to multi-graph convolutional sequence-to-sequence model (AMGC-Seq2Seq), which is a novel deep learning model for multistep flow prediction. The proposed model uses the encoder–decoder architecture, wherein the encoder part, spatial and temporal relations are encoded simultaneously. Then the encoded information is passed to the decoder to generate multistep outputs. In this work, specific multiple graphs are constructed to reflect spatial relations from different aspects, and we model them by using the proposed multi-graph convolution. Attention mechanism is also used to capture the important relations from previous information. Experiments on a large-scale real-world car-sharing dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over state-of-the-art methods.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
Kai Sun ◽  
Dian Yu ◽  
Dong Yu ◽  
Claire Cardie

Machine reading comprehension tasks require a machine reader to answer questions relevant to the given document. In this paper, we present the first free-form multiple-Choice Chinese machine reading Comprehension dataset (C3), containing 13,369 documents (dialogues or more formally written mixed-genre texts) and their associated 19,577 multiple-choice free-form questions collected from Chinese-as-a-second-language examinations. We present a comprehensive analysis of the prior knowledge (i.e., linguistic, domain-specific, and general world knowledge) needed for these real-world problems. We implement rule-based and popular neural methods and find that there is still a significant performance gap between the best performing model (68.5%) and human readers (96.0%), especiallyon problems that require prior knowledge. We further study the effects of distractor plausibility and data augmentation based on translated relevant datasets for English on model performance. We expect C3 to present great challenges to existing systems as answering 86.8% of questions requires both knowledge within and beyond the accompanying document, and we hope that C3 can serve as a platform to study how to leverage various kinds of prior knowledge to better understand a given written or orally oriented text. C3 is available at https://dataset.org/c3/ .


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 9563-9570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuailiang Zhang ◽  
Hai Zhao ◽  
Yuwei Wu ◽  
Zhuosheng Zhang ◽  
Xi Zhou ◽  
...  

Multi-choice reading comprehension is a challenging task to select an answer from a set of candidate options when given passage and question. Previous approaches usually only calculate question-aware passage representation and ignore passage-aware question representation when modeling the relationship between passage and question, which cannot effectively capture the relationship between passage and question. In this work, we propose dual co-matching network (DCMN) which models the relationship among passage, question and answer options bidirectionally. Besides, inspired by how humans solve multi-choice questions, we integrate two reading strategies into our model: (i) passage sentence selection that finds the most salient supporting sentences to answer the question, (ii) answer option interaction that encodes the comparison information between answer options. DCMN equipped with the two strategies (DCMN+) obtains state-of-the-art results on five multi-choice reading comprehension datasets from different domains: RACE, SemEval-2018 Task 11, ROCStories, COIN, MCTest.


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