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The question answering system can answer questions from various fields and forms with deep neural networks, but it still lacks effective ways when facing multiple evidences. We introduce a new model called SRQA, which means Synthetic Reader for Factoid Question Answering. This model enhances the question answering system in the multi-document scenario from three aspects: model structure, optimization goal, and training method, corresponding to Multilayer Attention (MA), Cross Evidence (CE), and Adversarial Training (AT) respectively. First, we propose a multilayer attention network to obtain a better representation of the evidences. The multilayer attention mechanism conducts interaction between the question and the passage within each layer, making the token representation of evidences in each layer takes the requirement of the question into account. Second, we design a cross evidence strategy to choose the answer span within more evidences. We improve the optimization goal, considering all the answers locations in multiple evidences as training targets, which leads the model to reason among multiple evidences. Third, adversarial training is employed to high-level variables besides the word embedding in our model. A new normalization method is also proposed for adversarial perturbations so that we can jointly add perturbations to several target variables. As an effective regularization method, adversarial training enhances the models ability to process noisy data. Combining these three strategies, we enhance the contextual representation and locating ability of our model, which could synthetically extract the answer span from several evidences. We perform SRQA on the WebQA dataset, and experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models (the best fuzzy score of our model is up to 78.56%, with an improvement of about 2%).
In this work, we describe our experiments and participating systems in the BioASQ Task 9b Phase B challenge of biomedical question answering. We have focused on finding the ideal answers and investigated multi-task fine-tuning and gradual unfreezing techniques on transformer-based language models. For factoid questions, our ALBERT-based systems ranked first in test batch 1 and fourth in test batch 2. Our DistilBERT systems outperformed the ALBERT variants in test batches 4 and 5 despite having 81% fewer parameters than ALBERT. However, we observed that gradual unfreezing had no significant impact on the models accuracy compared to standard fine-tuning.
Current open-domain question answering systems often follow a Retriever-Reader architecture, where the retriever first retrieves relevant passages and the reader then reads the retrieved passages to form an answer. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective passage reranking method, named Reader-guIDEd Reranker (RIDER), which does not involve training and reranks the retrieved passages solely based on the top predictions of the reader before reranking. We show that RIDER, despite its simplicity, achieves 10 to 20 absolute gains in top-1 retrieval accuracy and 1 to 4 Exact Match (EM) gains without refining the retriever or reader. In addition, RIDER, without any training, outperforms state-of-the-art transformer-based supervised rerankers. Remarkably, RIDER achieves 48.3 EM on the Natural Questions dataset and 66.4 EM on the TriviaQA dataset when only 1,024 tokens (7.8 passages on average) are used as the reader input after passage reranking.
Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) requires answering questions with external knowledge in addition to the content of images. One dataset that is mostly used in evaluating knowledge-based VQA is OK-VQA, but it lacks a gold standard knowledge corpus for retrieval. Existing work leverage different knowledge bases (e.g., ConceptNet and Wikipedia) to obtain external knowledge. Because of varying knowledge bases, it is hard to fairly compare models performance. To address this issue, we collect a natural language knowledge base that can be used for any VQA system. Moreover, we propose a Visual Retriever-Reader pipeline to approach knowledge-based VQA. The visual retriever aims to retrieve relevant knowledge, and the visual reader seeks to predict answers based on given knowledge. We introduce various ways to retrieve knowledge using text and images and two reader styles: classification and extraction. Both the retriever and reader are trained with weak supervision. Our experimental results show that a good retriever can significantly improve the readers performance on the OK-VQA challenge. The code and corpus are provided in https://github.com/luomancs/retriever_reader_for_okvqa.git
We introduce DELFT, a factoid question answering system which combines the nuance and depth of knowledge graph question answering approaches with the broader coverage of free-text. DELFT builds a free-text knowledge graph from Wikipedia, with entities as nodes and sentences in which entities co-occur as edges. For each question, DELFT finds the subgraph linking question entity nodes to candidates using text sentences as edges, creating a dense and high coverage semantic graph. A novel graph neural network reasons over the free-text graph-combining evidence on the nodes via information along edge sentences-to select a final answer. Experiments on three question answering datasets show DELFT can answer entity-rich questions better than machine reading based models, bert-based answer ranking and memory networks. DELFTs advantage comes from both the high coverage of its free-text knowledge graph-more than double that of dbpedia relations-and the novel graph neural network which reasons on the rich but noisy free-text evidence.
Despite recent progress, state-of-the-art question answering models remain vulnerable to a variety of adversarial attacks. While dynamic adversarial data collection, in which a human annotator tries to write examples that fool a model-in-the-loop, can improve model robustness, this process is expensive which limits the scale of the collected data. In this work, we are the first to use synthetic adversarial data generation to make question answering models more robust to human adversaries. We develop a data generation pipeline that selects source passages, identifies candidate answers, generates questions, then finally filters or re-labels them to improve quality. Using this approach, we amplify a smaller human-written adversarial dataset to a much larger set of synthetic question-answer pairs. By incorporating our synthetic data, we improve the state-of-the-art on the AdversarialQA dataset by 3.7F1 and improve model generalisation on nine of the twelve MRQA datasets. We further conduct a novel human-in-the-loop evaluation to show that our models are considerably more robust to new human-written adversarial examples: crowdworkers can fool our model only 8.8% of the time on average, compared to 17.6% for a model trained without synthetic data.