We develop a unified system to answer directly from text open-domain questions that may require a varying number of retrieval steps. We employ a single multi-task transformer model to perform all the necessary subtasks—retrieving supporting facts, reranking them, and predicting the answer from all retrieved documents—in an iterative fashion. We avoid crucial assumptions of previous work that do not transfer well to real-world settings, including exploiting knowledge of the fixed number of retrieval steps required to answer each question or using structured metadata like knowledge bases or web links that have limited availability. Instead, we design a system that can answer open-domain questions on any text collection without prior knowledge of reasoning complexity. To emulate this setting, we construct a new benchmark, called BeerQA, by combining existing one- and two-step datasets with a new collection of 530 questions that require three Wikipedia pages to answer, unifying Wikipedia corpora versions in the process. We show that our model demonstrates competitive performance on both existing benchmarks and this new benchmark. We make the new benchmark available at https://beerqa.github.io/.

We introduce Sentence-level Language Modeling, a new pre-training objective for learning a discourse language representation in a fully self-supervised manner. Recent pre-training methods in NLP focus on learning either bottom or top-level language representations: contextualized word representations derived from language model objectives at one extreme and a whole sequence representation learned by order classification of two given textual segments at the other. However, these models are not directly encouraged to capture representations of intermediate-size structures that exist in natural languages such as sentences and the relationships among them. To that end, we propose a new approach to encourage learning of a contextualized sentence-level representation by shuffling the sequence of input sentences and training a hierarchical transformer model to reconstruct the original ordering. Through experiments on downstream tasks such as GLUE, SQuAD, and DiscoEval, we show that this feature of our model improves the performance of the original BERT by large margins.

Recent developments in deep learning with application to language modeling have led to success in tasks of text processing, summarizing and machine translation. However, deploying huge language models for the mobile device such as on-device keyboards poses computation as a bottle-neck due to their puny computation capacities. In this work, we propose an on-device neural language model based word prediction method that optimizes run-time memory and also provides a real-time prediction environment. Our model size is 7.40MB and has average prediction time of 6.47 ms. Our proposed model outperforms the existing methods for word prediction in terms of keystroke savings and word prediction rate and has been successfully commercialized.

Reading Comprehension (RC) of text is one of the fundamental tasks in natural language processing. In recent years, several end-to-end neural network models have been proposed to solve RC tasks. However, most of these models suffer in reasoning over long documents. In this work, we propose a novel Memory Augmented Machine Comprehension Network (MAMCN) to address long-range dependencies present in machine reading comprehension. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate proposed method with the renowned benchmark datasets such as SQuAD, QUASAR-T, and TriviaQA. We achieve the state of the art performance on both the document-level (QUASAR-T, TriviaQA) and paragraph-level (SQuAD) datasets compared to all the previously published approaches.

We introduce a novel method to diminish the problem of out of vocabulary words by introducing an embedding method which leverages the agglutinative property of language. We propose additional embedding derived from syllables and morphemes for the words to improve the performance of language model. We apply the above method to input prediction tasks and achieve state of the art performance in terms of Key Stroke Saving (KSS) w.r.t. to existing device input prediction methods.