Generating Natural Answers by Incorporating Copying and Retrieving Mechanisms in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

Shizhu He, Cao Liu, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao


Abstract
Generating answer with natural language sentence is very important in real-world question answering systems, which needs to obtain a right answer as well as a coherent natural response. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end question answering system called COREQA in sequence-to-sequence learning, which incorporates copying and retrieving mechanisms to generate natural answers within an encoder-decoder framework. Specifically, in COREQA, the semantic units (words, phrases and entities) in a natural answer are dynamically predicted from the vocabulary, copied from the given question and/or retrieved from the corresponding knowledge base jointly. Our empirical study on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates the efficiency of COREQA, which is able to generate correct, coherent and natural answers for knowledge inquired questions.
Anthology ID:
P17-1019
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
199–208
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1019
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1019
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shizhu He, Cao Liu, Kang Liu, and Jun Zhao. 2017. Generating Natural Answers by Incorporating Copying and Retrieving Mechanisms in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 199–208, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Natural Answers by Incorporating Copying and Retrieving Mechanisms in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning (He et al., ACL 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/P17-1019.pdf