This paper aims at improving how machines can answer questions directly from text, with the focus of having models that can answer correctly multiple types of questions and from various types of texts, documents or even from large collections of them. To that end, we introduce the Weaver model that uses a new way to relate a question to a textual context by weaving layers of recurrent networks, with the goal of making as few assumptions as possible as to how the information from both question and context should be combined to form the answer. We show empirically on six datasets that Weaver performs well in multiple conditions. For instance, it produces solid results on the very popular SQuAD dataset (, 2016), solves almost all bAbI tasks (, 2015) and greatly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for open domain question answering from text (, 2017).
The machine reading task of learning to automatically answer questions given a provided piece of text (news article, fictional story, Wikipedia snippet, etc.) has been making great progress in recent years thanks to the creation of datasets like MCTest , QACNN DailyMail , CBT , WikiQA @cite_5 , bAbI , SQuAD or QAngaroo --- as well as initiatives to group them together like ParlAI .
@cite_5
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This paper proposes to tackle open- domain question answering using Wikipedia as the unique knowledge source: the answer to any factoid question is a text span in a Wikipedia article. This task of machine reading at scale combines the challenges of document retrieval (finding the relevant articles) with that of machine comprehension of text (identifying the answer spans from those articles). Our approach combines a search component based on bigram hashing and TF-IDF matching with a multi-layer recurrent neural network model trained to detect answers in Wikipedia paragraphs. Our experiments on multiple existing QA datasets indicate that (1) both modules are highly competitive with respect to existing counterparts and (2) multitask learning using distant supervision on their combination is an effective complete system on this challenging task. We present NewsQA, a challenging machine comprehension dataset of over 100,000 human-generated question-answer pairs. Crowdworkers supply questions and answers based on a set of over 10,000 news articles from CNN, with answers consisting of spans of text from the corresponding articles. We collect this dataset through a four-stage process designed to solicit exploratory questions that require reasoning. A thorough analysis confirms that NewsQA demands abilities beyond simple word matching and recognizing textual entailment. We measure human performance on the dataset and compare it to several strong neural models. The performance gap between humans and machines (0.198 in F1) indicates that significant progress can be made on NewsQA through future research. The dataset is freely available at this https URL. Many recent papers address reading comprehension, where examples consist of (question, passage, answer) tuples. Presumably, a model must combine information from both questions and passages to predict corresponding answers. However, despite intense interest in the topic, with hundreds of published papers vying for leaderboard dominance, basic questions about the difficulty of many popular benchmarks remain unanswered. In this paper, we establish sensible baselines for the bAbI, SQuAD, CBT, CNN, and Who-did-What datasets, finding that question- and passage-only models often perform surprisingly well. On @math out of @math bAbI tasks, passage-only models achieve greater than @math accuracy, sometimes matching the full model. Interestingly, while CBT provides @math -sentence stories only the last is needed for comparably accurate prediction. By comparison, SQuAD and CNN appear better-constructed. We publicly release a new large-scale dataset, called SearchQA, for machine comprehension, or question-answering. Unlike recently released datasets, such as DeepMind CNN DailyMail and SQuAD, the proposed SearchQA was constructed to reflect a full pipeline of general question-answering. That is, we start not from an existing article and generate a question-answer pair, but start from an existing question-answer pair, crawled from J! Archive, and augment it with text snippets retrieved by Google. Following this approach, we built SearchQA, which consists of more than 140k question-answer pairs with each pair having 49.6 snippets on average. Each question-answer-context tuple of the SearchQA comes with additional meta-data such as the snippet's URL, which we believe will be valuable resources for future research. We conduct human evaluation as well as test two baseline methods, one simple word selection and the other deep learning based, on the SearchQA. We show that there is a meaningful gap between the human and machine performances. This suggests that the proposed dataset could well serve as a benchmark for question-answering.