Supervised and Unsupervised Transfer Learning for Question Answering
Abstract
Although transfer learning has been shown to be successful for tasks like object and speech recognition, its applicability to question answering (QA) has yet to be well-studied. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate the transferability of knowledge learned from a source QA dataset to a target dataset using two QA models. The performance of both models on a TOEFL listening comprehension test (Tseng et al., 2016) and MCTest (Richardson et al., 2013) is significantly improved via a simple transfer learning technique from MovieQA (Tapaswi et al., 2016). In particular, one of the models achieves the state-of-the-art on all target datasets; for the TOEFL listening comprehension test, it outperforms the previous best model by 7%. Finally, we show that transfer learning is helpful even in unsupervised scenarios when correct answers for target QA dataset examples are not available.- Anthology ID:
- N18-1143
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- New Orleans, Louisiana
- Editors:
- Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1585–1594
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/N18-1143
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/N18-1143
- Cite (ACL):
- Yu-An Chung, Hung-Yi Lee, and James Glass. 2018. Supervised and Unsupervised Transfer Learning for Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 1585–1594, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Supervised and Unsupervised Transfer Learning for Question Answering (Chung et al., NAACL 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/N18-1143.pdf
- Data
- MCTest, MovieQA