Atsushi Otsuka


2019

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Multi-style Generative Reading Comprehension
Kyosuke Nishida | Itsumi Saito | Kosuke Nishida | Kazutoshi Shinoda | Atsushi Otsuka | Hisako Asano | Junji Tomita
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This study tackles generative reading comprehension (RC), which consists of answering questions based on textual evidence and natural language generation (NLG). We propose a multi-style abstractive summarization model for question answering, called Masque. The proposed model has two key characteristics. First, unlike most studies on RC that have focused on extracting an answer span from the provided passages, our model instead focuses on generating a summary from the question and multiple passages. This serves to cover various answer styles required for real-world applications. Second, whereas previous studies built a specific model for each answer style because of the difficulty of acquiring one general model, our approach learns multi-style answers within a model to improve the NLG capability for all styles involved. This also enables our model to give an answer in the target style. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Q&A task and the Q&A + NLG task of MS MARCO 2.1 and the summary task of NarrativeQA. We observe that the transfer of the style-independent NLG capability to the target style is the key to its success.

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Answering while Summarizing: Multi-task Learning for Multi-hop QA with Evidence Extraction
Kosuke Nishida | Kyosuke Nishida | Masaaki Nagata | Atsushi Otsuka | Itsumi Saito | Hisako Asano | Junji Tomita
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Question answering (QA) using textual sources for purposes such as reading comprehension (RC) has attracted much attention. This study focuses on the task of explainable multi-hop QA, which requires the system to return the answer with evidence sentences by reasoning and gathering disjoint pieces of the reference texts. It proposes the Query Focused Extractor (QFE) model for evidence extraction and uses multi-task learning with the QA model. QFE is inspired by extractive summarization models; compared with the existing method, which extracts each evidence sentence independently, it sequentially extracts evidence sentences by using an RNN with an attention mechanism on the question sentence. It enables QFE to consider the dependency among the evidence sentences and cover important information in the question sentence. Experimental results show that QFE with a simple RC baseline model achieves a state-of-the-art evidence extraction score on HotpotQA. Although designed for RC, it also achieves a state-of-the-art evidence extraction score on FEVER, which is a recognizing textual entailment task on a large textual database.

2015

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Discourse Relation Recognition by Comparing Various Units of Sentence Expression with Recursive Neural Network
Atsushi Otsuka | Toru Hirano | Chiaki Miyazaki | Ryo Masumura | Ryuichiro Higashinaka | Toshiro Makino | Yoshihiro Matsuo
Proceedings of the 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation