Answering Naturally: Factoid to Full length Answer Generation

Vaishali Pal, Manish Shrivastava, Irshad Bhat


Abstract
In recent years, the task of Question Answering over passages, also pitched as a reading comprehension, has evolved into a very active research area. A reading comprehension system extracts a span of text, comprising of named entities, dates, small phrases, etc., which serve as the answer to a given question. However, these spans of text would result in an unnatural reading experience in a conversational system. Usually, dialogue systems solve this issue by using template-based language generation. These systems, though adequate for a domain specific task, are too restrictive and predefined for a domain independent system. In order to present the user with a more conversational experience, we propose a pointer generator based full-length answer generator which can be used with most QA systems. Our system generates a full length answer given a question and the extracted factoid/span answer without relying on the passage from where the answer was extracted. We also present a dataset of 315000 question, factoid answer and full length answer triples. We have evaluated our system using ROUGE-1,2,L and BLEU and achieved 74.05 BLEU score and 86.25 Rogue-L score.
Anthology ID:
D19-5401
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Venue:
WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–9
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-5401
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-5401
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vaishali Pal, Manish Shrivastava, and Irshad Bhat. 2019. Answering Naturally: Factoid to Full length Answer Generation. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization, pages 1–9, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Answering Naturally: Factoid to Full length Answer Generation (Pal et al., 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/D19-5401.pdf