The Conversational Question Answering (CoQA) task involves answering a sequence of inter-related conversational questions about a contextual paragraph. Although existing approaches employ human-written ground-truth answers for answering conversational questions at test time, in a realistic scenario, the CoQA model will not have any access to ground-truth answers for the previous questions, compelling the model to rely upon its own previously predicted answers for answering the subsequent questions. In this paper, we find that compounding errors occur when using previously predicted answers at test time, significantly lowering the performance of CoQA systems. To solve this problem, we propose a sampling strategy that dynamically selects between target answers and model predictions during training, thereby closely simulating the situation at test time. Further, we analyse the severity of this phenomena as a function of the question type, conversation length and domain type.

This paper describes the entry NUIG in the WASSA 2017 (8th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis) shared task on emotion recognition. The NUIG system used an SVR (SVM regression) and BLSTM ensemble, utilizing primarily n-grams (for SVR features) and tweet word embeddings (for BLSTM features). Experiments were carried out on several other candidate features, some of which were added to the SVR model. Parameter selection for the SVR model was run as a grid search whilst parameters for the BLSTM model were selected through a non-exhaustive ad-hoc search.