Coarse-to-Fine Question Answering for Long Documents

Eunsol Choi, Daniel Hewlett, Jakob Uszkoreit, Illia Polosukhin, Alexandre Lacoste, Jonathan Berant


Abstract
We present a framework for question answering that can efficiently scale to longer documents while maintaining or even improving performance of state-of-the-art models. While most successful approaches for reading comprehension rely on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), running them over long documents is prohibitively slow because it is difficult to parallelize over sequences. Inspired by how people first skim the document, identify relevant parts, and carefully read these parts to produce an answer, we combine a coarse, fast model for selecting relevant sentences and a more expensive RNN for producing the answer from those sentences. We treat sentence selection as a latent variable trained jointly from the answer only using reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on a challenging subset of the WikiReading dataset and on a new dataset, while speeding up the model by 3.5x-6.7x.
Anthology ID:
P17-1020
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
209–220
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1020
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1020
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eunsol Choi, Daniel Hewlett, Jakob Uszkoreit, Illia Polosukhin, Alexandre Lacoste, and Jonathan Berant. 2017. Coarse-to-Fine Question Answering for Long Documents. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 209–220, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Coarse-to-Fine Question Answering for Long Documents (Choi et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1020.pdf
Data
WikiSuggestSQuADWikiReading