Joint Multitask Learning for Community Question Answering Using Task-Specific Embeddings

Shafiq Joty, Lluís Màrquez, Preslav Nakov

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Abstract
We address jointly two important tasks for Question Answering in community forums: given a new question, (i) find related existing questions, and (ii) find relevant answers to this new question. We further use an auxiliary task to complement the previous two, i.e., (iii) find good answers with respect to the thread question in a question-comment thread. We use deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn meaningful task-specific embeddings, which we then incorporate into a conditional random field (CRF) model for the multitask setting, performing joint learning over a complex graph structure. While DNNs alone achieve competitive results when trained to produce the embeddings, the CRF, which makes use of the embeddings and the dependencies between the tasks, improves the results significantly and consistently across a variety of evaluation metrics, thus showing the complementarity of DNNs and structured learning.
Anthology ID:
D18-1452
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4196–4207
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1452
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1452
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shafiq Joty, Lluís Màrquez, and Preslav Nakov. 2018. Joint Multitask Learning for Community Question Answering Using Task-Specific Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4196–4207, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Joint Multitask Learning for Community Question Answering Using Task-Specific Embeddings (Joty et al., EMNLP 2018)
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 https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/D18-1452.mp4