Synonym Knowledge Enhanced Reader for Chinese Idiom Reading Comprehension

Siyu Long, Ran Wang, Kun Tao, Jiali Zeng, Xinyu Dai

Abstract
Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is the task that asks a machine to answer questions based on a given context. For Chinese MRC, due to the non-literal and non-compositional semantic characteristics, Chinese idioms pose unique challenges for machines to understand. Previous studies tend to treat idioms separately without fully exploiting the relationship among them. In this paper, we first define the concept of literal meaning coverage to measure the consistency between semantics and literal meanings for Chinese idioms. With the definition, we prove that the literal meanings of many idioms are far from their semantics, and we also verify that the synonymic relationship can mitigate this inconsistency, which would be beneficial for idiom comprehension. Furthermore, to fully utilize the synonymic relationship, we propose the synonym knowledge enhanced reader. Specifically, for each idiom, we first construct a synonym graph according to the annotations from the high-quality synonym dictionary or the cosine similarity between the pre-trained idiom embeddings and then incorporate the graph attention network and gate mechanism to encode the graph. Experimental results on ChID, a large-scale Chinese idiom reading comprehension dataset, show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.329
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3684–3695
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.329
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.329
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siyu Long, Ran Wang, Kun Tao, Jiali Zeng, and Xinyu Dai. 2020. Synonym Knowledge Enhanced Reader for Chinese Idiom Reading Comprehension. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3684–3695, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Synonym Knowledge Enhanced Reader for Chinese Idiom Reading Comprehension (Long et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.coling-main.329.pdf
Code
 njunlp/SKER
Data
ChID
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