Justin Harris


2017

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NewsQA: A Machine Comprehension Dataset
Adam Trischler | Tong Wang | Xingdi Yuan | Justin Harris | Alessandro Sordoni | Philip Bachman | Kaheer Suleman
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

We present NewsQA, a challenging machine comprehension dataset of over 100,000 human-generated question-answer pairs. Crowdworkers supply questions and answers based on a set of over 10,000 news articles from CNN, with answers consisting of spans of text in the articles. We collect this dataset through a four-stage process designed to solicit exploratory questions that require reasoning. Analysis confirms that NewsQA demands abilities beyond simple word matching and recognizing textual entailment. We measure human performance on the dataset and compare it to several strong neural models. The performance gap between humans and machines (13.3% F1) indicates that significant progress can be made on NewsQA through future research. The dataset is freely available online.

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Frames: a corpus for adding memory to goal-oriented dialogue systems
Layla El Asri | Hannes Schulz | Shikhar Sharma | Jeremie Zumer | Justin Harris | Emery Fine | Rahul Mehrotra | Kaheer Suleman
Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

This paper proposes a new dataset, Frames, composed of 1369 human-human dialogues with an average of 15 turns per dialogue. This corpus contains goal-oriented dialogues between users who are given some constraints to book a trip and assistants who search a database to find appropriate trips. The users exhibit complex decision-making behaviour which involve comparing trips, exploring different options, and selecting among the trips that were discussed during the dialogue. To drive research on dialogue systems towards handling such behaviour, we have annotated and released the dataset and we propose in this paper a task called frame tracking. This task consists of keeping track of different semantic frames throughout each dialogue. We propose a rule-based baseline and analyse the frame tracking task through this baseline.