Sequential Attention: A Context-Aware Alignment Function for Machine Reading

In this paper we propose a neural network model with a novel Sequential Attention layer that extends soft attention by assigning weights to words in an input sequence in a way that takes into account not just how well that word matches a query, but how well surrounding words match. We evaluate this approach on the task of reading comprehension (on the Who did What and CNN datasets) and show that it dramatically improves a strong baseline--the Stanford Reader--and is competitive with the state of the art.Comment: To appear in ACL 2017 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP. Contains additional experiments in section 4 and a revised Figure

Who did What: A Large-Scale Person-Centered Cloze Dataset

We have constructed a new "Who-did-What" dataset of over 200,000 fill-in-the-gap (cloze) multiple choice reading comprehension problems constructed from the LDC English Gigaword newswire corpus. The WDW dataset has a variety of novel features. First, in contrast with the CNN and Daily Mail datasets (Hermann et al., 2015) we avoid using article summaries for question formation. Instead, each problem is formed from two independent articles --- an article given as the passage to be read and a separate article on the same events used to form the question. Second, we avoid anonymization --- each choice is a person named entity. Third, the problems have been filtered to remove a fraction that are easily solved by simple baselines, while remaining 84% solvable by humans. We report performance benchmarks of standard systems and propose the WDW dataset as a challenge task for the community.Comment: To appear at EMNLP 2016. Our dataset is available at tticnlp.github.io/who_did_wha