This paper constructs a Chinese dialogue-based information-seeking question answering dataset CMDQA, which is mainly applied to the scenario of getting Chinese movie related information. It contains 10K QA dialogs (40K turns in total). All questions and background documents are compiled from the Wikipedia via an Internet crawler. The answers to the questions are obtained via extracting the corresponding answer spans within the related text passage. In CMDQA, in addition to searching related documents, pronouns are also added to the question to better mimic the real dialog scenario. This dataset can test the individual performance of the information retrieval, the question answering and the question re-writing modules. This paper also provides a baseline system and shows its performance on this dataset. The experiments elucidate that it still has a big gap to catch the human performance. This dataset thus provides enough challenge for the researcher to conduct related research.

Sentence alignment is an essential step in studying the mapping among different language expressions, and the character trigram overlapping ratio was reported to be the most effective similarity measure in aligning sentences in the text simplification dataset. However, the appropriateness of each similarity measure depends on the characteristics of the corpus to be aligned. This paper studies if the character trigram is still a suitable similarity measure for the task of aligning sentences in a paragraph paraphrasing corpus. We compare several embedding-based and non-embeddings model-agnostic similarity measures, including those that have not been studied previously. The evaluation is conducted on parallel paragraphs sampled from the Webis-CPC-11 corpus, which is a paragraph paraphrasing dataset. Our results show that modern BERT-based measures such as Sentence-BERT or BERTScore can lead to significant improvement in this task.

This paper presents a framework to answer the questions that require various kinds of inference mechanisms (such as Extraction, Entailment-Judgement, and Summarization). Most of the previous approaches adopt a rigid framework which handles only one inference mechanism. Only a few of them adopt several answer generation modules for providing different mechanisms; however, they either lack an aggregation mechanism to merge the answers from various modules, or are too complicated to be implemented with neural networks. To alleviate the problems mentioned above, we propose a divide-and-conquer framework, which consists of a set of various answer generation modules, a dispatch module, and an aggregation module. The answer generation modules are designed to provide different inference mechanisms, the dispatch module is used to select a few appropriate answer generation modules to generate answer candidates, and the aggregation module is employed to select the final answer. We test our framework on the 2020 Formosa Grand Challenge Contest dataset. Experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art Roberta-large model by about 11.4%.

Current neural math solvers learn to incorporate commonsense or domain knowledge by utilizing pre-specified constants or formulas. However, as these constants and formulas are mainly human-specified, the generalizability of the solvers is limited. In this paper, we propose to explicitly retrieve the required knowledge from math problemdatasets. In this way, we can determinedly characterize the required knowledge andimprove the explainability of solvers. Our two algorithms take the problem text andthe solution equations as input. Then, they try to deduce the required commonsense and domain knowledge by integrating information from both parts. We construct two math datasets and show the effectiveness of our algorithms that they can retrieve the required knowledge for problem-solving.

With the recent advancements in deep learning, neural solvers have gained promising results in solving math word problems. However, these SOTA solvers only generate binary expression trees that contain basic arithmetic operators and do not explicitly use the math formulas. As a result, the expression trees they produce are lengthy and uninterpretable because they need to use multiple operators and constants to represent one single formula. In this paper, we propose sequence-to-general tree (S2G) that learns to generate interpretable and executable operation trees where the nodes can be formulas with an arbitrary number of arguments. With nodes now allowed to be formulas, S2G can learn to incorporate mathematical domain knowledge into problem-solving, making the results more interpretable. Experiments show that S2G can achieve a better performance against strong baselines on problems that require domain knowledge.

In the context of natural language processing, representation learning has emerged as a newly active research subject because of its excellent performance in many applications. Learning representations of words is a pioneering study in this school of research. However, paragraph (or sentence and document) embedding learning is more suitable/reasonable for some tasks, such as sentiment classification and document summarization. Nevertheless, as far as we are aware, there is only a dearth of research focusing on launching unsupervised paragraph embedding methods. Classic paragraph embedding methods infer the representation of a given paragraph by considering all of the words occurring in the paragraph. Consequently, those stop or function words that occur frequently may mislead the embedding learning process to produce a misty paragraph representation. Motivated by these observations, our major contributions are twofold. First, we propose a novel unsupervised paragraph embedding method, named the essence vector (EV) model, which aims at not only distilling the most representative information from a paragraph but also excluding the general background information to produce a more informative low-dimensional vector representation for the paragraph. We evaluate the proposed EV model on benchmark sentiment classification and multi-document summarization tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed embedding method. Second, in view of the increasing importance of spoken content processing, an extension of the EV model, named the denoising essence vector (D-EV) model, is proposed. The D-EV model not only inherits the advantages of the EV model but also can infer a more robust representation for a given spoken paragraph against imperfect speech recognition. The utility of the D-EV model is evaluated on a spoken document summarization task, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed embedding method in relation to several well-practiced and state-of-the-art summarization methods.