Learn a prior question-aware feature for machine reading comprehension

Machine reading comprehension aims to train machines to comprehend a given context and then answer a series of questions according to their understanding of the context. It is the cornerstone of conversational reading comprehension and question answering tasks. Recently, researches of Machine readin...

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Main Authors: Yu Zhang, Bo Shen, Xing Cao
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-12-01
Series:Frontiers in Physics
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2022.1085102/full
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author Yu Zhang
Bo Shen
Xing Cao
author_facet Yu Zhang
Bo Shen
Xing Cao
author_sort Yu Zhang
collection DOAJ
description Machine reading comprehension aims to train machines to comprehend a given context and then answer a series of questions according to their understanding of the context. It is the cornerstone of conversational reading comprehension and question answering tasks. Recently, researches of Machine reading comprehension have experienced considerable development with more and more semantic features being incorporated into end-to-end neural network models, such as pre-trained word embedding features, syntactic features, context and question interaction features, and so on. However, these methods neglect the understanding of the question itself and the information sought by the question. In this paper, we design an auxiliary question-and-answer matching task to learn the features of different types of questions and then integrate these learned features into a classical Machine reading comprehension model architecture to improve its ability to comprehend the questions. Our auxiliary task relies on a simple Question-Answer Pairs dataset generated by ourselves. And we incorporate the learned question-type information into the Machine reading comprehension model by prior attention mechanism. The model we proposed is named PrA-MRC (Prior Attention on Machine reading comprehension). Empirical results show that our approach is effective and interpretable. Our Question-Answer Pairs model achieves an accuracy of 84% and our PrA-MRC model outperforms the baseline model by +0.7 EM and +1.1 F1 on the SQuAD dataset.
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spelling doaj.art-ea10137435454bda87f5c4c25bfd00832022-12-22T10:04:06ZengFrontiers Media S.A.Frontiers in Physics2296-424X2022-12-011010.3389/fphy.2022.10851021085102Learn a prior question-aware feature for machine reading comprehensionYu Zhang0Bo Shen1Xing Cao2School of Electronic and Information, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, ChinaKey Laboratory of Communication and Information Systems, Beijing Municipal Commission of Education, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, ChinaSchool of Electronic and Information, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, ChinaMachine reading comprehension aims to train machines to comprehend a given context and then answer a series of questions according to their understanding of the context. It is the cornerstone of conversational reading comprehension and question answering tasks. Recently, researches of Machine reading comprehension have experienced considerable development with more and more semantic features being incorporated into end-to-end neural network models, such as pre-trained word embedding features, syntactic features, context and question interaction features, and so on. However, these methods neglect the understanding of the question itself and the information sought by the question. In this paper, we design an auxiliary question-and-answer matching task to learn the features of different types of questions and then integrate these learned features into a classical Machine reading comprehension model architecture to improve its ability to comprehend the questions. Our auxiliary task relies on a simple Question-Answer Pairs dataset generated by ourselves. And we incorporate the learned question-type information into the Machine reading comprehension model by prior attention mechanism. The model we proposed is named PrA-MRC (Prior Attention on Machine reading comprehension). Empirical results show that our approach is effective and interpretable. Our Question-Answer Pairs model achieves an accuracy of 84% and our PrA-MRC model outperforms the baseline model by +0.7 EM and +1.1 F1 on the SQuAD dataset.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2022.1085102/fullquestion and answer pairsprior attention mechanismtransfer learningmachine reading comprehension (MRC)nature language processing (NLP)
spellingShingle Yu Zhang
Bo Shen
Xing Cao
Learn a prior question-aware feature for machine reading comprehension
Frontiers in Physics
question and answer pairs
prior attention mechanism
transfer learning
machine reading comprehension (MRC)
nature language processing (NLP)
title Learn a prior question-aware feature for machine reading comprehension
title_full Learn a prior question-aware feature for machine reading comprehension
title_fullStr Learn a prior question-aware feature for machine reading comprehension
title_full_unstemmed Learn a prior question-aware feature for machine reading comprehension
title_short Learn a prior question-aware feature for machine reading comprehension
title_sort learn a prior question aware feature for machine reading comprehension
topic question and answer pairs
prior attention mechanism
transfer learning
machine reading comprehension (MRC)
nature language processing (NLP)
url https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2022.1085102/full
work_keys_str_mv AT yuzhang learnapriorquestionawarefeatureformachinereadingcomprehension
AT boshen learnapriorquestionawarefeatureformachinereadingcomprehension
AT xingcao learnapriorquestionawarefeatureformachinereadingcomprehension