Learning to Collaborate for Question Answering and Asking

Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Zhao Yan, Zhirui Zhang, Yibo Sun, Shujie Liu, Yuanhua Lv, Ming Zhou

Abstract
Question answering (QA) and question generation (QG) are closely related tasks that could improve each other; however, the connection of these two tasks is not well explored in literature. In this paper, we give a systematic study that seeks to leverage the connection to improve both QA and QG. We present a training algorithm that generalizes both Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Generative Domain-Adaptive Nets (GDAN) under the question answering scenario. The two key ideas are improving the QG model with QA through incorporating additional QA-specific signal as the loss function, and improving the QA model with QG through adding artificially generated training instances. We conduct experiments on both document based and knowledge based question answering tasks. We have two main findings. Firstly, the performance of a QG model (e.g in terms of BLEU score) could be easily improved by a QA model via policy gradient. Secondly, directly applying GAN that regards all the generated questions as negative instances could not improve the accuracy of the QA model. Learning when to regard generated questions as positive instances could bring performance boost.
Anthology ID:
N18-1141
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1564–1574
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1141
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1141
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Zhao Yan, Zhirui Zhang, Yibo Sun, Shujie Liu, Yuanhua Lv, and Ming Zhou. 2018. Learning to Collaborate for Question Answering and Asking. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 1564–1574, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Collaborate for Question Answering and Asking (Tang et al., NAACL 2018)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ml4al-ingestion/N18-1141.pdf
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