This study tackles unsupervised domain adaptation of reading comprehension (UDARC). Reading comprehension (RC) is a task to learn the capability for question answering with textual sources. State-of-the-art models on RC still do not have general linguistic intelligence; i.e., their accuracy worsens for out-domain datasets that are not used in the training. We hypothesize that this discrepancy is caused by a lack of the language modeling (LM) capability for the out-domain. The UDARC task allows models to use supervised RC training data in the source domain and only unlabeled passages in the target domain. To solve the UDARC problem, we provide two domain adaptation models. The first one learns the out-domain LM and in-domain RC task sequentially. The second one is the proposed model that uses a multi-task learning approach of LM and RC. The models can retain both the RC capability acquired from the supervised data in the source domain and the LM capability from the unlabeled data in the target domain. We evaluated the models on UDARC with five datasets in different domains. The models outperformed the model without domain adaptation. In particular, the proposed model yielded an improvement of 4.3/4.2 points in EM/F1 in an unseen biomedical domain.

This study tackles generative reading comprehension (RC), which consists of answering questions based on textual evidence and natural language generation (NLG). We propose a multi-style abstractive summarization model for question answering, called Masque. The proposed model has two key characteristics. First, unlike most studies on RC that have focused on extracting an answer span from the provided passages, our model instead focuses on generating a summary from the question and multiple passages. This serves to cover various answer styles required for real-world applications. Second, whereas previous studies built a specific model for each answer style because of the difficulty of acquiring one general model, our approach learns multi-style answers within a model to improve the NLG capability for all styles involved. This also enables our model to give an answer in the target style. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Q&A task and the Q&A + NLG task of MS MARCO 2.1 and the summary task of NarrativeQA. We observe that the transfer of the style-independent NLG capability to the target style is the key to its success.

Question answering (QA) using textual sources for purposes such as reading comprehension (RC) has attracted much attention. This study focuses on the task of explainable multi-hop QA, which requires the system to return the answer with evidence sentences by reasoning and gathering disjoint pieces of the reference texts. It proposes the Query Focused Extractor (QFE) model for evidence extraction and uses multi-task learning with the QA model. QFE is inspired by extractive summarization models; compared with the existing method, which extracts each evidence sentence independently, it sequentially extracts evidence sentences by using an RNN with an attention mechanism on the question sentence. It enables QFE to consider the dependency among the evidence sentences and cover important information in the question sentence. Experimental results show that QFE with a simple RC baseline model achieves a state-of-the-art evidence extraction score on HotpotQA. Although designed for RC, it also achieves a state-of-the-art evidence extraction score on FEVER, which is a recognizing textual entailment task on a large textual database.

Conversational machine comprehension (CMC) requires understanding the context of multi-turn dialogue. Using BERT, a pretraining language model, has been successful for single-turn machine comprehension, while modeling multiple turns of question answering with BERT has not been established because BERT has a limit on the number and the length of input sequences. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method with BERT for CMC. Our method uses BERT to encode a paragraph independently conditioned with each question and each answer in a multi-turn context. Then, the method predicts an answer on the basis of the paragraph representations encoded with BERT. The experiments with representative CMC datasets, QuAC and CoQA, show that our method outperformed recently published methods (+0.8 F1 on QuAC and +2.1 F1 on CoQA). In addition, we conducted a detailed analysis of the effects of the number and types of dialogue history on the accuracy of CMC, and we found that the gold answer history, which may not be given in an actual conversation, contributed to the model performance most on both datasets.

This study focuses on acquisition of commonsense knowledge. A previous study proposed a commonsense knowledge base completion (CKB completion) method that predicts a confidence score of for triplet-style knowledge for improving the coverage of CKBs. To improve the accuracy of CKB completion and expand the size of CKBs, we formulate a new commonsense knowledge base generation task (CKB generation) and propose a joint learning method that incorporates both CKB completion and CKB generation. Experimental results show that the joint learning method improved completion accuracy and the generation model created reasonable knowledge. Our generation model could also be used to augment data and improve the accuracy of completion.

Social media texts, such as tweets from Twitter, contain many types of non-standard tokens, and the number of normalization approaches for handling such noisy text has been increasing. We present a method for automatically extracting pairs of a variant word and its normal form from unsegmented text on the basis of a pair-wise similarity approach. We incorporated the acquired variant-normalization pairs into Japanese morphological analysis. The experimental results show that our method can extract widely covered variants from large Twitter data and improve the recall of normalization without degrading the overall accuracy of Japanese morphological analysis.

In this study, we investigated the effectiveness of augmented data for encoder-decoder-based neural normalization models. Attention based encoder-decoder models are greatly effective in generating many natural languages. % such as machine translation or machine summarization. In general, we have to prepare for a large amount of training data to train an encoder-decoder model. Unlike machine translation, there are few training data for text-normalization tasks. In this paper, we propose two methods for generating augmented data. The experimental results with Japanese dialect normalization indicate that our methods are effective for an encoder-decoder model and achieve higher BLEU score than that of baselines. We also investigated the oracle performance and revealed that there is sufficient room for improving an encoder-decoder model.

We propose named entity abstraction methods with fine-grained named entity labels for improving statistical machine translation (SMT). The methods are based on a bilingual named entity recognizer that uses a monolingual named entity recognizer with transliteration. Through experiments, we demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained named entities into statistical machine translation improves the accuracy of SMT with more adequate granularity compared with the standard SMT, which is a non-named entity abstraction method.