Combining Impression Feature Representation for Multi-turn Conversational Question Answering

Shaoling Jing, Shibo Hong, Dongyan Zhao, Haihua Xie, Zhi Tang


Abstract
Multi-turn conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) is a practical task that requires the understanding of conversation history, such as previous QA pairs, the passage context, and current question. It can be applied to a variety of scenarios with human-machine dialogue. The major challenge of this task is to require the model to consider the relevant conversation history while understanding the passage. Existing methods usually simply prepend the history to the current question, or use the complicated mechanism to model the history. This article proposes an impression feature, which use the word-level inter attention mechanism to learn multi-oriented information from conversation history to the input sequence, including attention from history tokens to each token of the input sequence, and history turn inter attention from different history turns to each token of the input sequence, and self-attention within input sequence, where the input sequence contains a current question and a passage. Then a feature selection method is designed to enhance the useful history turns of conversation and weaken the unnecessary information. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the QuAC dataset, analyze the impact of different feature selection methods, and verify the validity and reliability of the proposed features through visualization and human evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2020.ccl-1.80
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2020
Address:
Haikou, China
Editors:
Maosong Sun (孙茂松), Sujian Li (李素建), Yue Zhang (张岳), Yang Liu (刘洋)
Venue:
CCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Chinese Information Processing Society of China
Note:
Pages:
863–873
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.ccl-1.80
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shaoling Jing, Shibo Hong, Dongyan Zhao, Haihua Xie, and Zhi Tang. 2020. Combining Impression Feature Representation for Multi-turn Conversational Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 863–873, Haikou, China. Chinese Information Processing Society of China.
Cite (Informal):
Combining Impression Feature Representation for Multi-turn Conversational Question Answering (Jing et al., CCL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.ccl-1.80.pdf
Data
CoQAQuACSQuAD