This paper constructs a Chinese dialogue-based information-seeking question answering dataset CMDQA, which is mainly applied to the scenario of getting Chinese movie related information. It contains 10K QA dialogs (40K turns in total). All questions and background documents are compiled from the Wikipedia via an Internet crawler. The answers to the questions are obtained via extracting the corresponding answer spans within the related text passage. In CMDQA, in addition to searching related documents, pronouns are also added to the question to better mimic the real dialog scenario. This dataset can test the individual performance of the information retrieval, the question answering and the question re-writing modules. This paper also provides a baseline system and shows its performance on this dataset. The experiments elucidate that it still has a big gap to catch the human performance. This dataset thus provides enough challenge for the researcher to conduct related research.

This paper presents a framework to answer the questions that require various kinds of inference mechanisms (such as Extraction, Entailment-Judgement, and Summarization). Most of the previous approaches adopt a rigid framework which handles only one inference mechanism. Only a few of them adopt several answer generation modules for providing different mechanisms; however, they either lack an aggregation mechanism to merge the answers from various modules, or are too complicated to be implemented with neural networks. To alleviate the problems mentioned above, we propose a divide-and-conquer framework, which consists of a set of various answer generation modules, a dispatch module, and an aggregation module. The answer generation modules are designed to provide different inference mechanisms, the dispatch module is used to select a few appropriate answer generation modules to generate answer candidates, and the aggregation module is employed to select the final answer. We test our framework on the 2020 Formosa Grand Challenge Contest dataset. Experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art Roberta-large model by about 11.4%.

Due to the development of deep learning, the natural language processing tasks have made great progresses by leveraging the bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT). The goal of information retrieval is to search the most relevant results for the user’s query from a large set of documents. Although BERT-based retrieval models have shown excellent results in many studies, these models usually suffer from the need for large amounts of computations and/or additional storage spaces. In view of the flaws, a BERT-based Siamese-structured retrieval model (BESS) is proposed in this paper. BESS not only inherits the merits of pre-trained language models, but also can generate extra information to compensate the original query automatically. Besides, the reinforcement learning strategy is introduced to make the model more robust. Accordingly, we evaluate BESS on three public-available corpora, and the experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed retrieval model.

This technical report aims at the ROCLING 2021 Shared Task: Dimensional Sentiment Analysis for Educational Texts. In order to predict the affective states of Chinese educational texts, we present a practical framework by employing pre-trained language models, such as BERT and MacBERT. Several valuable observations and analyses can be drawn from a series of experiments. From the results, we find that MacBERT-based methods can deliver better results than BERT-based methods on the verification set. Therefore, we average the prediction results of several models obtained using different settings as the final output.

In this paper, we proposed a BERT-based dimensional semantic analyzer, which is designed by incorporating with word-level information. Our model achieved three of the best results in four metrics on “ROCLING 2021 Shared Task: Dimensional Sentiment Analysis for Educational Texts”. We conducted a series of experiments to compare the effectiveness of different pre-trained methods. Besides, the results also proofed that our method can significantly improve the performances than classic methods. Based on the experiments, we also discussed the impact of model architectures and datasets.

In the context of natural language processing, representation learning has emerged as a newly active research subject because of its excellent performance in many applications. Learning representations of words is a pioneering study in this school of research. However, paragraph (or sentence and document) embedding learning is more suitable/reasonable for some tasks, such as sentiment classification and document summarization. Nevertheless, as far as we are aware, there is only a dearth of research focusing on launching unsupervised paragraph embedding methods. Classic paragraph embedding methods infer the representation of a given paragraph by considering all of the words occurring in the paragraph. Consequently, those stop or function words that occur frequently may mislead the embedding learning process to produce a misty paragraph representation. Motivated by these observations, our major contributions are twofold. First, we propose a novel unsupervised paragraph embedding method, named the essence vector (EV) model, which aims at not only distilling the most representative information from a paragraph but also excluding the general background information to produce a more informative low-dimensional vector representation for the paragraph. We evaluate the proposed EV model on benchmark sentiment classification and multi-document summarization tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed embedding method. Second, in view of the increasing importance of spoken content processing, an extension of the EV model, named the denoising essence vector (D-EV) model, is proposed. The D-EV model not only inherits the advantages of the EV model but also can infer a more robust representation for a given spoken paragraph against imperfect speech recognition. The utility of the D-EV model is evaluated on a spoken document summarization task, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed embedding method in relation to several well-practiced and state-of-the-art summarization methods.