Discern: Discourse-Aware Entailment Reasoning Network for Conversational Machine Reading
Yifan Gao, Chien-Sheng Wu, Jingjing Li, Shafiq Joty, Steven C.H. Hoi, Caiming Xiong, Irwin King, Michael Lyu
Abstract
Document interpretation and dialog understanding are the two major challenges for conversational machine reading. In this work, we propose “Discern”, a discourse-aware entailment reasoning network to strengthen the connection and enhance the understanding of both document and dialog. Specifically, we split the document into clause-like elementary discourse units (EDU) using a pre-trained discourse segmentation model, and we train our model in a weakly-supervised manner to predict whether each EDU is entailed by the user feedback in a conversation. Based on the learned EDU and entailment representations, we either reply to the user our final decision “yes/no/irrelevant” of the initial question, or generate a follow-up question to inquiry more information. Our experiments on the ShARC benchmark (blind, held-out test set) show that Discern achieves state-of-the-art results of 78.3% macro-averaged accuracy on decision making and 64.0 BLEU1 on follow-up question generation. Code and models are released at https://github.com/Yifan-Gao/Discern.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.emnlp-main.191
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2439–2449
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.191
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.191
- Cite (ACL):
- Yifan Gao, Chien-Sheng Wu, Jingjing Li, Shafiq Joty, Steven C.H. Hoi, Caiming Xiong, Irwin King, and Michael Lyu. 2020. Discern: Discourse-Aware Entailment Reasoning Network for Conversational Machine Reading. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 2439–2449, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Discern: Discourse-Aware Entailment Reasoning Network for Conversational Machine Reading (Gao et al., EMNLP 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2020.emnlp-main.191.pdf
- Code
- Yifan-Gao/Discern
- Data
- ShARC