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QuesNet: A Unified Representation for Heterogeneous Test Questions
Understanding learning materials (e.g. test questions) is a crucial issue in
online learning systems, which can promote many applications in education
domain. Unfortunately, many supervised approaches suffer from the problem of
scarce human labeled data, whereas abundant unlabeled resources are highly
underutilized. To alleviate this problem, an effective solution is to use
pre-trained representations for question understanding. However, existing
pre-training methods in NLP area are infeasible to learn test question
representations due to several domain-specific characteristics in education.
First, questions usually comprise of heterogeneous data including content text,
images and side information. Second, there exists both basic linguistic
information as well as domain logic and knowledge. To this end, in this paper,
we propose a novel pre-training method, namely QuesNet, for comprehensively
learning question representations. Specifically, we first design a unified
framework to aggregate question information with its heterogeneous inputs into
a comprehensive vector. Then we propose a two-level hierarchical pre-training
algorithm to learn better understanding of test questions in an unsupervised
way. Here, a novel holed language model objective is developed to extract
low-level linguistic features, and a domain-oriented objective is proposed to
learn high-level logic and knowledge. Moreover, we show that QuesNet has good
capability of being fine-tuned in many question-based tasks. We conduct
extensive experiments on large-scale real-world question data, where the
experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of QuesNet for
question understanding as well as its superior applicability
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