Retrospective Reader for Machine Reading Comprehension

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is an AI challenge that requires machine to determine the correct answers to questions based on a given passage. MRC systems must not only answer question when necessary but also distinguish when no answer is available according to the given passage and then tactfully abstain from answering. When unanswerable questions are involved in the MRC task, an essential verification module called verifier is especially required in addition to the encoder, though the latest practice on MRC modeling still most benefits from adopting well pre-trained language models as the encoder block by only focusing on the "reading". This paper devotes itself to exploring better verifier design for the MRC task with unanswerable questions. Inspired by how humans solve reading comprehension questions, we proposed a retrospective reader (Retro-Reader) that integrates two stages of reading and verification strategies: 1) sketchy reading that briefly investigates the overall interactions of passage and question, and yield an initial judgment; 2) intensive reading that verifies the answer and gives the final prediction. The proposed reader is evaluated on two benchmark MRC challenge datasets SQuAD2.0 and NewsQA, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Significance tests show that our model is significantly better than the strong ELECTRA and ALBERT baselines. A series of analysis is also conducted to interpret the effectiveness of the proposed reader.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 202

Disorder effects on the quantum coherence of a many-boson system

The effects of disorders on the quantum coherence for many-bosons are studied in a double well model. For the ground state, the disorder enhances the quantum coherence. In the deep Mott regime, dynamical evolution reveals periodical collapses and revivals of the quantum coherence which is robust against the disorder. The average over variations in both the on-site energy and the interaction reveals a beat phenomenon of the coherence-decoherence oscillation in the temporal evolution.Comment: 4 figure