Non-sentential Question Resolution using Sequence to Sequence Learning

Vineet Kumar, Sachindra Joshi


Abstract
An interactive Question Answering (QA) system frequently encounters non-sentential (incomplete) questions. These non-sentential questions may not make sense to the system when a user asks them without the context of conversation. The system thus needs to take into account the conversation context to process the question. In this work, we present a recurrent neural network (RNN) based encoder decoder network that can generate a complete (intended) question, given an incomplete question and conversation context. RNN encoder decoder networks have been show to work well when trained on a parallel corpus with millions of sentences, however it is extremely hard to obtain conversation data of this magnitude. We therefore propose to decompose the original problem into two separate simplified problems where each problem focuses on an abstraction. Specifically, we train a semantic sequence model to learn semantic patterns, and a syntactic sequence model to learn linguistic patterns. We further combine syntactic and semantic sequence models to generate an ensemble model. Our model achieves a BLEU score of 30.15 as compared to 18.54 using a standard RNN encoder decoder model.
Anthology ID:
C16-1190
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
2022–2031
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1190
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vineet Kumar and Sachindra Joshi. 2016. Non-sentential Question Resolution using Sequence to Sequence Learning. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 2022–2031, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Non-sentential Question Resolution using Sequence to Sequence Learning (Kumar & Joshi, COLING 2016)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/C16-1190.pdf