This paper presents our study of cloze-style reading comprehension by imitating human reading comprehension, which normally involves tactical comparing and reasoning over candidates while choosing the best answer. We propose a multi-choice relational reasoning (McR²) model with an aim to enable relational reasoning on candidates based on fusion representations of document, query and candidates. For the fusion representations, we develop an efficient encoding architecture by integrating the schemes of bidirectional attention flow, self-attention and document-gated query reading. Then, comparing and inferring over candidates are executed by a novel relational reasoning network. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets derived from two public corpora, Children’s Book Test and Who DiD What, to verify the validity and advantages of our model. The results show that it outperforms all baseline models significantly on the four benchmark datasets. The effectiveness of its key components is also validated by an ablation study.

We investigate the impact of input data scale in corpus-based learning using a study style of Zipf’s law. In our research, Chinese word segmentation is chosen as the study case and a series of experiments are specially conducted for it, in which two types of segmentation techniques, statistical learning and rule-based methods, are examined. The empirical results show that a linear performance improvement in statistical learning requires an exponential increasing of training corpus size at least. As for the rule-based method, an approximate negative inverse relationship between the performance and the size of the input lexicon can be observed.