Stochastic Answer Networks for Machine Reading Comprehension

Xiaodong Liu, Yelong Shen, Kevin Duh, Jianfeng Gao


Abstract
We propose a simple yet robust stochastic answer network (SAN) that simulates multi-step reasoning in machine reading comprehension. Compared to previous work such as ReasoNet which used reinforcement learning to determine the number of steps, the unique feature is the use of a kind of stochastic prediction dropout on the answer module (final layer) of the neural network during the training. We show that this simple trick improves robustness and achieves results competitive to the state-of-the-art on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), the Adversarial SQuAD, and the Microsoft MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset (MS MARCO).
Anthology ID:
P18-1157
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1694–1704
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1157
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1157
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaodong Liu, Yelong Shen, Kevin Duh, and Jianfeng Gao. 2018. Stochastic Answer Networks for Machine Reading Comprehension. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1694–1704, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Stochastic Answer Networks for Machine Reading Comprehension (Liu et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/P18-1157.pdf
Poster:
 P18-1157.Poster.pdf
Code
 additional community code
Data
MS MARCOSQuAD