@inproceedings{hu-etal-2019-retrieve,
    title = "Retrieve, Read, Rerank: Towards End-to-End Multi-Document Reading Comprehension",
    author = "Hu, Minghao  and
      Peng, Yuxing  and
      Huang, Zhen  and
      Li, Dongsheng",
    editor = "Korhonen, Anna  and
      Traum, David  and
      M{\`a}rquez, Llu{\'i}s",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = jul,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/P19-1221/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/P19-1221",
    pages = "2285--2295",
    abstract = "This paper considers the reading comprehension task in which multiple documents are given as input. Prior work has shown that a pipeline of retriever, reader, and reranker can improve the overall performance. However, the pipeline system is inefficient since the input is re-encoded within each module, and is unable to leverage upstream components to help downstream training. In this work, we present RE$^3$QA, a unified question answering model that combines context retrieving, reading comprehension, and answer reranking to predict the final answer. Unlike previous pipelined approaches, RE$^3$QA shares contextualized text representation across different components, and is carefully designed to use high-quality upstream outputs (e.g., retrieved context or candidate answers) for directly supervising downstream modules (e.g., the reader or the reranker). As a result, the whole network can be trained end-to-end to avoid the context inconsistency problem. Experiments show that our model outperforms the pipelined baseline and achieves state-of-the-art results on two versions of TriviaQA and two variants of SQuAD."
}