We propose a multi-task learning framework to learn a joint Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) model that can be applied to a wide range of MRC tasks in different domains. Inspired by recent ideas of data selection in machine translation, we develop a novel sample re-weighting scheme to assign sample-specific weights to the loss. Empirical study shows that our approach can be applied to many existing MRC models. Combined with contextual representations from pre-trained language models (such as ELMo), we achieve new state-of-the-art results on a set of MRC benchmark datasets. We release our code at this https URL.
This paper presents a novel neural model - Dynamic Fusion Network (DFN), for machine reading comprehension (MRC). DFNs differ from most state-of-the-art models in their use of a dynamic multi-strategy attention process, in which passages, questions and answer candidates are jointly fused into attention vectors, along with a dynamic multi-step reasoning module for generating answers. With the use of reinforcement learning, for each input sample that consists of a question, a passage and a list of candidate answers, an instance of DFN with a sample-specific network architecture can be dynamically constructed by determining what attention strategy to apply and how many reasoning steps to take. Experiments show that DFNs achieve the best result reported on RACE, a challenging MRC dataset that contains real human reading questions in a wide variety of types. A detailed empirical analysis also demonstrates that DFNs can produce attention vectors that summarize information from questions, passages and answer candidates more effectively than other popular MRC models.  Machine comprehension (MC), answering a query about a given context paragraph, requires modeling complex interactions between the context and the query. Recently, attention mechanisms have been successfully extended to MC. Typically these methods use attention to focus on a small portion of the context and summarize it with a fixed-size vector, couple attentions temporally, and or often form a uni-directional attention. In this paper we introduce the Bi-Directional Attention Flow (BIDAF) network, a multi-stage hierarchical process that represents the context at different levels of granularity and uses bi-directional attention flow mechanism to obtain a query-aware context representation without early summarization. Our experimental evaluations show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art results in Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) and CNN DailyMail cloze test. Current end-to-end machine reading and question answering (Q &A) models are primarily based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with attention. Despite their success, these models are often slow for both training and inference due to the sequential nature of RNNs. We propose a new Q &A architecture called QANet, which does not require recurrent networks: Its encoder consists exclusively of convolution and self-attention, where convolution models local interactions and self-attention models global interactions. On the SQuAD dataset, our model is 3x to 13x faster in training and 4x to 9x faster in inference, while achieving equivalent accuracy to recurrent models. The speed-up gain allows us to train the model with much more data. We hence combine our model with data generated by backtranslation from a neural machine translation model. On the SQuAD dataset, our single model, trained with augmented data, achieves 84.6 F1 score on the test set, which is significantly better than the best published F1 score of 81.8.