9,152 research outputs found
Learning to Skim Text
Recurrent Neural Networks are showing much promise in many sub-areas of
natural language processing, ranging from document classification to machine
translation to automatic question answering. Despite their promise, many
recurrent models have to read the whole text word by word, making it slow to
handle long documents. For example, it is difficult to use a recurrent network
to read a book and answer questions about it. In this paper, we present an
approach of reading text while skipping irrelevant information if needed. The
underlying model is a recurrent network that learns how far to jump after
reading a few words of the input text. We employ a standard policy gradient
method to train the model to make discrete jumping decisions. In our benchmarks
on four different tasks, including number prediction, sentiment analysis, news
article classification and automatic Q\&A, our proposed model, a modified LSTM
with jumping, is up to 6 times faster than the standard sequential LSTM, while
maintaining the same or even better accuracy
Supervised and Unsupervised Transfer Learning for Question Answering
Although transfer learning has been shown to be successful for tasks like
object and speech recognition, its applicability to question answering (QA) has
yet to be well-studied. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments to
investigate the transferability of knowledge learned from a source QA dataset
to a target dataset using two QA models. The performance of both models on a
TOEFL listening comprehension test (Tseng et al., 2016) and MCTest (Richardson
et al., 2013) is significantly improved via a simple transfer learning
technique from MovieQA (Tapaswi et al., 2016). In particular, one of the models
achieves the state-of-the-art on all target datasets; for the TOEFL listening
comprehension test, it outperforms the previous best model by 7%. Finally, we
show that transfer learning is helpful even in unsupervised scenarios when
correct answers for target QA dataset examples are not available.Comment: To appear in NAACL HLT 2018 (long paper
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