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From Question to Text: Question-Oriented Feature Attention for Answer Selection

Published: 30 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding unstructured texts is an essential skill for human beings as it enables knowledge acquisition. Although understanding unstructured texts is easy for we human beings with good education, it is a great challenge for machines. Recently, with the rapid development of artificial intelligence techniques, researchers put efforts to teach machines to understand texts and justify the educated machines by letting them solve the questions upon the given unstructured texts, inspired by the reading comprehension test as we humans do. However, feature effectiveness with respect to different questions significantly hinders the performance of answer selection, because different questions may focus on various aspects of the given text and answer candidates. To solve this problem, we propose a question-oriented feature attention (QFA) mechanism, which learns to weight different engineering features according to the given question, so that important features with respect to the specific question is emphasized accordingly. Experiments on MCTest dataset have well-validated the effectiveness of the proposed method. Additionally, the proposed QFA is applicable to various IR tasks, such as question answering and answer selection. We have verified the applicability on a crawled community-based question-answering dataset.

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  1. From Question to Text: Question-Oriented Feature Attention for Answer Selection

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Information Systems
    ACM Transactions on Information Systems  Volume 37, Issue 1
    January 2019
    435 pages
    ISSN:1046-8188
    EISSN:1558-2868
    DOI:10.1145/3289475
    Issue’s Table of Contents
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    Publication History

    Published: 30 October 2018
    Accepted: 01 June 2018
    Revised: 01 March 2018
    Received: 01 July 2017
    Published in TOIS Volume 37, Issue 1

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    Author Tags

    1. Question answering
    2. answer selection
    3. attention method

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    Funding Sources

    • National Basic Research Program of China 973 Program
    • Project of Thousand Youth Talents 2016
    • National High Technology Research and Development Program of China 863 Program
    • Tencent AI Lab Rhino-Bird Joint Research Program
    • National Natural Science Foundation of China

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