Inferential Machine Comprehension: Answering Questions by Recursively Deducing the Evidence Chain from Text

Jianxing Yu, Zhengjun Zha, Jian Yin


Abstract
This paper focuses on the topic of inferential machine comprehension, which aims to fully understand the meanings of given text to answer generic questions, especially the ones needed reasoning skills. In particular, we first encode the given document, question and options in a context aware way. We then propose a new network to solve the inference problem by decomposing it into a series of attention-based reasoning steps. The result of the previous step acts as the context of next step. To make each step can be directly inferred from the text, we design an operational cell with prior structure. By recursively linking the cells, the inferred results are synthesized together to form the evidence chain for reasoning, where the reasoning direction can be guided by imposing structural constraints to regulate interactions on the cells. Moreover, a termination mechanism is introduced to dynamically determine the uncertain reasoning depth, and the network is trained by reinforcement learning. Experimental results on 3 popular data sets, including MCTest, RACE and MultiRC, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Anthology ID:
P19-1217
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2241–2251
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1217
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1217
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jianxing Yu, Zhengjun Zha, and Jian Yin. 2019. Inferential Machine Comprehension: Answering Questions by Recursively Deducing the Evidence Chain from Text. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2241–2251, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Inferential Machine Comprehension: Answering Questions by Recursively Deducing the Evidence Chain from Text (Yu et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1217.pdf
Data
MCTestMultiRCRACE