Supervised Transfer Learning for Product Information Question Answering

Popular e-commerce websites such as Amazon offer community question answering systems for users to pose product related questions and experienced customers may provide answers voluntarily. In this paper, we show that the large volume of existing community question answering data can be beneficial when building a system for answering questions related to product facts and specifications. Our experimental results demonstrate that the performance of a model for answering questions related to products listed in the Home Depot website can be improved by a large margin via a simple transfer learning technique from an existing large-scale Amazon community question answering dataset. Transfer learning can result in an increase of about 10% in accuracy in the experimental setting where we restrict the size of the data of the target task used for training. As an application of this work, we integrate the best performing model trained in this work into a mobile-based shopping assistant and show its usefulness.Comment: 2018 17th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Application

Making Neural QA as Simple as Possible but not Simpler

Recent development of large-scale question answering (QA) datasets triggered a substantial amount of research into end-to-end neural architectures for QA. Increasingly complex systems have been conceived without comparison to simpler neural baseline systems that would justify their complexity. In this work, we propose a simple heuristic that guides the development of neural baseline systems for the extractive QA task. We find that there are two ingredients necessary for building a high-performing neural QA system: first, the awareness of question words while processing the context and second, a composition function that goes beyond simple bag-of-words modeling, such as recurrent neural networks. Our results show that FastQA, a system that meets these two requirements, can achieve very competitive performance compared with existing models. We argue that this surprising finding puts results of previous systems and the complexity of recent QA datasets into perspective

Neogeography: The Challenge of Channelling Large and Ill-Behaved Data Streams

Neogeography is the combination of user generated data and experiences with mapping technologies. In this article we present a research project to extract valuable structured information with a geographic component from unstructured user generated text in wikis, forums, or SMSes. The extracted information should be integrated together to form a collective knowledge about certain domain. This structured information can be used further to help users from the same domain who want to get information using simple question answering system. The project intends to help workers communities in developing countries to share their knowledge, providing a simple and cheap way to contribute and get benefit using the available communication technology

Improved Neural Relation Detection for Knowledge Base Question Answering

Relation detection is a core component for many NLP applications including Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA). In this paper, we propose a hierarchical recurrent neural network enhanced by residual learning that detects KB relations given an input question. Our method uses deep residual bidirectional LSTMs to compare questions and relation names via different hierarchies of abstraction. Additionally, we propose a simple KBQA system that integrates entity linking and our proposed relation detector to enable one enhance another. Experimental results evidence that our approach achieves not only outstanding relation detection performance, but more importantly, it helps our KBQA system to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy for both single-relation (SimpleQuestions) and multi-relation (WebQSP) QA benchmarks.Comment: Accepted by ACL 2017 (updated for camera-ready