Open-domain question answering is a challenging task with a wide variety of practical applications. Existing modern approaches mostly follow a standard two-stage paradigm: retriever then reader. In this article, we focus on improving the effectiveness of the reader module and propose a novel copy-augmented generative approach that integrates the merits of both extractive and generative readers. In particular, our model is built upon the powerful generative model FiD (CITATION). We enhance the original generative reader by incorporating a pointer network to encourage the model to directly copy words from the retrieved passages. We conduct experiments on the two benchmark datasets, Natural Questions and TriviaQA, and the empirical results demonstrate the performance gains of our proposed approach.

Label-specific topics can be widely used for supporting personality psychology, aspect-level sentiment analysis, and cross-domain sentiment classification. To generate label-specific topics, several supervised topic models which adopt likelihood-driven objective functions have been proposed. However, it is hard for them to get a precise estimation on both topic discovery and supervised learning. In this study, we propose a supervised topic model based on the Siamese network, which can trade off label-specific word distributions with document-specific label distributions in a uniform framework. Experiments on real-world datasets validate that our model performs competitive in topic discovery quantitatively and qualitatively. Furthermore, the proposed model can effectively predict categorical or real-valued labels for new documents by generating word embeddings from a label-specific topical space.