Enhancing Extractive Question Answering in Multiparty Dialogues with Logical Inference Memory Network

Shu Zhou, Rui Zhao, Zhengda Zhou, Haohan Yi, Xuhui Zheng, Hao Wang


Abstract
Multiparty dialogue question answering (QA) in machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a challenging task due to its complex information flow interactions and logical QA inference. Existing models typically handle such QA tasks by decoupling dialogue information at both speaker and utterance levels. However, few of them consider the logical inference relations in multiparty dialogue QA, leading to suboptimal QA performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a memory network with logical inference (LIMN) for extractive QA in multiparty dialogues. LIMN introduces an inference module, which is pretrained by incorporating plain QA articles as external knowledge. It generates logical inference-aware representations from latent space for multiparty dialogues. To further model complex interactions among logical dialogue contexts, questions and key-utterance information, a key-utterance-based interaction method is proposed for leverage. Moreover, a multitask learning strategy is adopted for robust MRC. Extensive experiments were conducted on Molweni and FriendsQA benchmarks, which included 25k and 10k questions, respectively. Comparative results showed that LIMN achieves state-of-the-art results on both benchmarks, demonstrating the enhancement of logical QA inference in multiparty dialogue QA tasks.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.583
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8725–8738
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.583/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shu Zhou, Rui Zhao, Zhengda Zhou, Haohan Yi, Xuhui Zheng, and Hao Wang. 2025. Enhancing Extractive Question Answering in Multiparty Dialogues with Logical Inference Memory Network. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8725–8738, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Extractive Question Answering in Multiparty Dialogues with Logical Inference Memory Network (Zhou et al., COLING 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.583.pdf