Globally Normalized Reader

Jonathan Raiman, John Miller


Abstract
Rapid progress has been made towards question answering (QA) systems that can extract answers from text. Existing neural approaches make use of expensive bi-directional attention mechanisms or score all possible answer spans, limiting scalability. We propose instead to cast extractive QA as an iterative search problem: select the answer’s sentence, start word, and end word. This representation reduces the space of each search step and allows computation to be conditionally allocated to promising search paths. We show that globally normalizing the decision process and back-propagating through beam search makes this representation viable and learning efficient. We empirically demonstrate the benefits of this approach using our model, Globally Normalized Reader (GNR), which achieves the second highest single model performance on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (68.4 EM, 76.21 F1 dev) and is 24.7x faster than bi-attention-flow. We also introduce a data-augmentation method to produce semantically valid examples by aligning named entities to a knowledge base and swapping them with new entities of the same type. This method improves the performance of all models considered in this work and is of independent interest for a variety of NLP tasks.
Anthology ID:
D17-1111
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1059–1069
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1111
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1111
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonathan Raiman and John Miller. 2017. Globally Normalized Reader. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1059–1069, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Globally Normalized Reader (Raiman & Miller, EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1111.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/D17-1111.mp4
Code
 baidu-research/GloballyNormalizedReader
Data
MS MARCONewsQASQuAD