Multi-Passage Machine Reading Comprehension with Cross-Passage Answer Verification

Yizhong Wang, Kai Liu, Jing Liu, Wei He, Yajuan Lyu, Hua Wu, Sujian Li, Haifeng Wang


Abstract
Machine reading comprehension (MRC) on real web data usually requires the machine to answer a question by analyzing multiple passages retrieved by search engine. Compared with MRC on a single passage, multi-passage MRC is more challenging, since we are likely to get multiple confusing answer candidates from different passages. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end neural model that enables those answer candidates from different passages to verify each other based on their content representations. Specifically, we jointly train three modules that can predict the final answer based on three factors: the answer boundary, the answer content and the cross-passage answer verification. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the baseline by a large margin and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the English MS-MARCO dataset and the Chinese DuReader dataset, both of which are designed for MRC in real-world settings.
Anthology ID:
P18-1178
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:
1918–1927
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1178
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1178
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yizhong Wang, Kai Liu, Jing Liu, Wei He, Yajuan Lyu, Hua Wu, Sujian Li, and Haifeng Wang. 2018. Multi-Passage Machine Reading Comprehension with Cross-Passage Answer Verification. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1918–1927, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Passage Machine Reading Comprehension with Cross-Passage Answer Verification (Wang et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/P18-1178.pdf
Presentation:
 P18-1178.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/285804921
Data
DuReaderMS MARCO