Training large-scale question answering systems is complicated because training sources usually cover a small portion of the range of possible questions. This paper studies the impact of multitask and transfer learning for simple question answering; a setting for which the reasoning required to answer is quite easy, as long as one can retrieve the correct evidence given a question, which can be difficult in large-scale conditions. To this end, we introduce a new dataset of 100k questions that we use in conjunction with existing benchmarks. We conduct our study within the framework of Memory Networks (, 2015) because this perspective allows us to eventually scale up to more complex reasoning, and show that Memory Networks can be successfully trained to achieve excellent performance.
Like our work, embedding-based methods for QA can be seen as simple MemNNs. The algorithms of @cite_16 @cite_3 use an approach similar to ours but are based on rather than , and relied purely on bag-of-word for both questions and facts. The approach of @cite_13 uses a different representation of questions, in which recognized entities are replaced by an entity token, and a different training data using entity mentions from Wikipedia . Our model is closest to the one presented in @cite_2 , which is discussed in more details in the experiments.
@cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_3 @cite_2
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Building computers able to answer questions on any subject is a long standing goal of artificial intelligence. Promising progress has recently been achieved by methods that learn to map questions to logical forms or database queries. Such approaches can be effective but at the cost of either large amounts of human-labeled data or by defining lexicons and grammars tailored by practitioners. In this paper, we instead take the radical approach of learning to map questions to vectorial feature representations. By mapping answers into the same space one can query any knowledge base independent of its schema, without requiring any grammar or lexicon. Our method is trained with a new optimization procedure combining stochastic gradient descent followed by a fine-tuning step using the weak supervision provided by blending automatically and collaboratively generated resources. We empirically demonstrate that our model can capture meaningful signals from its noisy supervision leading to major improvements over paralex, the only existing method able to be trained on similar weakly labeled data. Transforming a natural language (NL) question into a corresponding logical form (LF) is central to the knowledge-based question answering (KB-QA) task. Unlike most previous methods that achieve this goal based on mappings between lexicalized phrases and logical predicates, this paper goes one step further and proposes a novel embedding-based approach that maps NL-questions into LFs for KBQA by leveraging semantic associations between lexical representations and KBproperties in the latent space. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms three KB-QA baseline methods on two publicly released QA data sets. We introduce a neural network with a recurrent attention model over a possibly large external memory. The architecture is a form of Memory Network (, 2015) but unlike the model in that work, it is trained end-to-end, and hence requires significantly less supervision during training, making it more generally applicable in realistic settings. It can also be seen as an extension of RNNsearch to the case where multiple computational steps (hops) are performed per output symbol. The flexibility of the model allows us to apply it to tasks as diverse as (synthetic) question answering and to language modeling. For the former our approach is competitive with Memory Networks, but with less supervision. For the latter, on the Penn TreeBank and Text8 datasets our approach demonstrates comparable performance to RNNs and LSTMs. In both cases we show that the key concept of multiple computational hops yields improved results. This paper presents a system which learns to answer questions on a broad range of topics from a knowledge base using few hand-crafted features. Our model learns low-dimensional embeddings of words and knowledge base constituents; these representations are used to score natural language questions against candidate answers. Training our system using pairs of questions and structured representations of their answers, and pairs of question paraphrases, yields competitive results on a competitive benchmark of the literature.