scholarly journals Relevance-guided Supervision for OpenQA with ColBERT

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 929-944
Author(s):  
Omar Khattab ◽  
Christopher Potts ◽  
Matei Zaharia

Abstract Systems for Open-Domain Question Answering (OpenQA) generally depend on a retriever for finding candidate passages in a large corpus and a reader for extracting answers from those passages. In much recent work, the retriever is a learned component that uses coarse-grained vector representations of questions and passages. We argue that this modeling choice is insufficiently expressive for dealing with the complexity of natural language questions. To address this, we define ColBERT-QA, which adapts the scalable neural retrieval model ColBERT to OpenQA. ColBERT creates fine-grained interactions between questions and passages. We propose an efficient weak supervision strategy that iteratively uses ColBERT to create its own training data. This greatly improves OpenQA retrieval on Natural Questions, SQuAD, and TriviaQA, and the resulting system attains state-of-the-art extractive OpenQA performance on all three datasets.

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 8082-8090
Author(s):  
Tushar Khot ◽  
Peter Clark ◽  
Michal Guerquin ◽  
Peter Jansen ◽  
Ashish Sabharwal

Composing knowledge from multiple pieces of texts is a key challenge in multi-hop question answering. We present a multi-hop reasoning dataset, Question Answering via Sentence Composition (QASC), that requires retrieving facts from a large corpus and composing them to answer a multiple-choice question. QASC is the first dataset to offer two desirable properties: (a) the facts to be composed are annotated in a large corpus, and (b) the decomposition into these facts is not evident from the question itself. The latter makes retrieval challenging as the system must introduce new concepts or relations in order to discover potential decompositions. Further, the reasoning model must then learn to identify valid compositions of these retrieved facts using common-sense reasoning. To help address these challenges, we provide annotation for supporting facts as well as their composition. Guided by these annotations, we present a two-step approach to mitigate the retrieval challenges. We use other multiple-choice datasets as additional training data to strengthen the reasoning model. Our proposed approach improves over current state-of-the-art language models by 11% (absolute). The reasoning and retrieval problems, however, remain unsolved as this model still lags by 20% behind human performance.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Vollmers ◽  
Rricha Jalota ◽  
Diego Moussallem ◽  
Hardik Topiwala ◽  
Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo ◽  
...  

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) systems are often based on machine learning algorithms, requiring thousands of question-answer pairs as training examples or natural language processing pipelines that need module fine-tuning. In this paper, we present a novel QA approach, dubbed TeBaQA. Our approach learns to answer questions based on graph isomorphisms from basic graph patterns of SPARQL queries. Learning basic graph patterns is efficient due to the small number of possible patterns. This novel paradigm reduces the amount of training data necessary to achieve state-of-the-art performance. TeBaQA also speeds up the domain adaption process by transforming the QA system development task into a much smaller and easier data compilation task. In our evaluation, TeBaQA achieves state-of-the-art performance on QALD-8 and delivers comparable results on QALD-9 and LC-QuAD v1. Additionally, we performed a fine-grained evaluation on complex queries that deal with aggregation and superlative questions as well as an ablation study, highlighting future research challenges.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yikui Zhai ◽  
He Cao ◽  
Wenbo Deng ◽  
Junying Gan ◽  
Vincenzo Piuri ◽  
...  

Because of the lack of discriminative face representations and scarcity of labeled training data, facial beauty prediction (FBP), which aims at assessing facial attractiveness automatically, has become a challenging pattern recognition problem. Inspired by recent promising work on fine-grained image classification using the multiscale architecture to extend the diversity of deep features, BeautyNet for unconstrained facial beauty prediction is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a multiscale network is adopted to improve the discriminative of face features. Secondly, to alleviate the computational burden of the multiscale architecture, MFM (max-feature-map) is utilized as an activation function which can not only lighten the network and speed network convergence but also benefit the performance. Finally, transfer learning strategy is introduced here to mitigate the overfitting phenomenon which is caused by the scarcity of labeled facial beauty samples and improves the proposed BeautyNet’s performance. Extensive experiments performed on LSFBD demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, which can achieve 67.48% classification accuracy.


Author(s):  
Hengyi Cai ◽  
Hongshen Chen ◽  
Yonghao Song ◽  
Xiaofang Zhao ◽  
Dawei Yin

Humans benefit from previous experiences when taking actions. Similarly, related examples from the training data also provide exemplary information for neural dialogue models when responding to a given input message. However, effectively fusing such exemplary information into dialogue generation is non-trivial: useful exemplars are required to be not only literally-similar, but also topic-related with the given context. Noisy exemplars impair the neural dialogue models understanding the conversation topics and even corrupt the response generation. To address the issues, we propose an exemplar guided neural dialogue generation model where exemplar responses are retrieved in terms of both the text similarity and the topic proximity through a two-stage exemplar retrieval model. In the first stage, a small subset of conversations is retrieved from a training set given a dialogue context. These candidate exemplars are then finely ranked regarding the topical proximity to choose the best-matched exemplar response. To further induce the neural dialogue generation model consulting the exemplar response and the conversation topics more faithfully, we introduce a multi-source sampling mechanism to provide the dialogue model with both local exemplary semantics and global topical guidance during decoding. Empirical evaluations on a large-scale conversation dataset show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of both the quantitative metrics and human evaluations.


Author(s):  
Hong Chen ◽  
Yongtan Luo ◽  
Liujuan Cao ◽  
Baochang Zhang ◽  
Guodong Guo ◽  
...  

Vehicle detection and recognition in remote sensing images are challenging, especially when only limited training data are available to accommodate various target categories. In this paper, we introduce a novel coarse-to-fine framework, which decomposes vehicle detection into segmentation-based vehicle localization and generalized zero-shot vehicle classification. Particularly, the proposed framework can well handle the problem of generalized zero-shot vehicle detection, which is challenging due to the requirement of recognizing vehicles that are even unseen during training. Specifically, a hierarchical DeepLab v3 model is proposed in the framework, which fully exploits fine-grained features to locate the target on a pixel-wise level, then recognizes vehicles in a coarse-grained manner. Additionally, the hierarchical DeepLab v3 model is beneficially compatible to combine the generalized zero-shot recognition. To the best of our knowledge, there is no publically available dataset to test comparative methods, we therefore construct a new dataset to fill this gap of evaluation. The experimental results show that the proposed framework yields promising results on the imperative yet difficult task of zero-shot vehicle detection and recognition.


Author(s):  
Wentao Ding ◽  
Guanji Gao ◽  
Linfeng Shi ◽  
Yuzhong Qu

Recognizing time expressions is a fundamental and important task in many applications of natural language understanding, such as reading comprehension and question answering. Several newest state-of-the-art approaches have achieved good performance on recognizing time expressions. These approaches are black-boxed or based on heuristic rules, which leads to the difficulty in understanding the temporal information. On the contrary, classic rule-based or semantic parsing approaches can capture rich structural information, but their performances on recognition are not so good. In this paper, we propose a pattern-based approach, called PTime, which automatically generates and selects patterns for recognizing time expressions. In this approach, time expressions in training text are abstracted into type sequences by using fine-grained token types, thus the problem is transformed to select an appropriate subset of the sequential patterns. We use the Extended Budgeted Maximum Coverage (EBMC) model to optimize the pattern selection. The main idea is to maximize the correct token sequences matched by the selected patterns while the number of the mistakes should be limited by an adjustable budget. The interpretability of patterns and the adjustability of permitted number of mistakes make PTime a very promising approach for many applications. Experimental results show that PTime achieves a very competitive performance as compared with existing state-of-the-art approaches.


Author(s):  
Kyung-Min Kim ◽  
Min-Oh Heo ◽  
Seong-Ho Choi ◽  
Byoung-Tak Zhang

Question-answering (QA) on video contents is a significant challenge for achieving human-level intelligence as it involves both vision and language in real-world settings. Here we demonstrate the possibility of an AI agent performing video story QA by learning from a large amount of cartoon videos. We develop a video-story learning model, i.e. Deep Embedded Memory Networks (DEMN), to reconstruct stories from a joint scene-dialogue video stream using a latent embedding space of observed data. The video stories are stored in a long-term memory component. For a given question, an LSTM-based attention model uses the long-term memory to recall the best question-story-answer triplet by focusing on specific words containing key information. We trained the DEMN on a novel QA dataset of children’s cartoon video series, Pororo. The dataset contains 16,066 scene-dialogue pairs of 20.5-hour videos, 27,328 fine-grained sentences for scene description, and 8,913 story-related QA pairs. Our experimental results show that the DEMN outperforms other QA models. This is mainly due to 1) the reconstruction of video stories in a scene-dialogue combined form that utilize the latent embedding and 2) attention. DEMN also achieved state-of-the-art results on the MovieQA benchmark.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiqin Luo ◽  
Yanpeng Sun ◽  
Liang Chang ◽  
Tianlong Gu ◽  
Chenzhong Bin ◽  
...  

Abstract In context-aware recommendation systems, most existing methods encode users’ preferences by mapping item and category information into the same space, which is just a stack of information. The item and category information contained in the interaction behaviours is not fully utilized. Moreover, since users’ preferences for a candidate item are influenced by the changes in temporal and historical behaviours, it is unreasonable to predict correlations between users and candidates by using users’ fixed features. A fine-grained and coarse-grained information based framework proposed in our paper which considers multi-granularity information of users’ historical behaviours. First, a parallel structure is provided to mine users’ preference information under different granularities. Then, self-attention and attention mechanisms are used to capture the dynamic preferences. Experiment results on two publicly available datasets show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods across the calculated evaluation metrics.


Author(s):  
Zilu Guo ◽  
Zhongqiang Huang ◽  
Kenny Q. Zhu ◽  
Guandan Chen ◽  
Kaibo Zhang ◽  
...  

Paraphrase generation plays key roles in NLP tasks such as question answering, machine translation, and information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for paraphrase generation. It simultaneously decodes the output sentence using a pretrained wordset-to-sequence model and a round-trip translation model. We evaluate this framework on Quora, WikiAnswers, MSCOCO and Twitter, and show its advantage over previous state-of-the-art unsupervised methods and distantly-supervised methods by significant margins on all datasets. For Quora and WikiAnswers, our framework even performs better than some strongly supervised methods with domain adaptation. Further, we show that the generated paraphrases can be used to augment the training data for machine translation to achieve substantial improvements.


Author(s):  
Xiaoxiao Sun ◽  
Liyi Chen ◽  
Jufeng Yang

Fine-grained classification is absorbed in recognizing the subordinate categories of one field, which need a large number of labeled images, while it is expensive to label these images. Utilizing web data has been an attractive option to meet the demands of training data for convolutional neural networks (CNNs), especially when the well-labeled data is not enough. However, directly training on such easily obtained images often leads to unsatisfactory performance due to factors such as noisy labels. This has been conventionally addressed by reducing the noise level of web data. In this paper, we take a fundamentally different view and propose an adversarial discriminative loss to advocate representation coherence between standard and web data. This is further encapsulated in a simple, scalable and end-to-end trainable multi-task learning framework. We experiment on three public datasets using large-scale web data to evaluate the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed approach. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.


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