Sinem Guven


2021

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Technical Question Answering across Tasks and Domains
Wenhao Yu | Lingfei Wu | Yu Deng | Qingkai Zeng | Ruchi Mahindru | Sinem Guven | Meng Jiang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Industry Papers

Building automatic technical support system is an important yet challenge task. Conceptually, to answer a user question on a technical forum, a human expert has to first retrieve relevant documents, and then read them carefully to identify the answer snippet. Despite huge success the researchers have achieved in coping with general domain question answering (QA), much less attentions have been paid for investigating technical QA. Specifically, existing methods suffer from several unique challenges (i) the question and answer rarely overlaps substantially and (ii) very limited data size. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of deep transfer learning to effectively address technical QA across tasks and domains. To this end, we present an adjustable joint learning approach for document retrieval and reading comprehension tasks. Our experiments on the TechQA demonstrates superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

2020

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A Technical Question Answering System with Transfer Learning
Wenhao Yu | Lingfei Wu | Yu Deng | Ruchi Mahindru | Qingkai Zeng | Sinem Guven | Meng Jiang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

In recent years, the need for community technical question-answering sites has increased significantly. However, it is often expensive for human experts to provide timely and helpful responses on those forums. We develop TransTQA, which is a novel system that offers automatic responses by retrieving proper answers based on correctly answered similar questions in the past. TransTQA is built upon a siamese ALBERT network, which enables it to respond quickly and accurately. Furthermore, TransTQA adopts a standard deep transfer learning strategy to improve its capability of supporting multiple technical domains.