Answer selection (AS) is an important subtask of document-based question answering (DQA). In this task, the candidate answers come from the same document, and each answer sentence is semantically related to the given question, which makes it more challenging to select the true answer. WordNet provides powerful knowledge about concepts and their semantic relations so we employ WordNet to enrich the abilities of paraphrasing and reasoning of the network-based question answering model. Specifically, we exploit the synset and hypernym concepts to enrich the word representation and incorporate the similarity scores of two concepts that share the synset or hypernym relations into the attention mechanism. The proposed WordNet-enhanced hierarchical model (WEHM) consists of four modules, including WordNet-enhanced word representation, sentence encoding, WordNet-enhanced attention mechanism, and hierarchical document encoding. Extensive experiments on the public WikiQA and SelQA datasets demonstrate that our proposed model significantly improves the baseline system and outperforms all existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

Cross-domain Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) remains a challenge despite recent progress in neural-based CWS. The limited amount of annotated data in the target domain has been the key obstacle to a satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised word-based approach to improving cross-domain CWS given a baseline segmenter. Particularly, our model only deploys word embeddings trained on raw text in the target domain, discarding complex hand-crafted features and domain-specific dictionaries. Innovative subsampling and negative sampling methods are proposed to derive word embeddings optimized for CWS. We conduct experiments on five datasets in special domains, covering domains in novels, medicine, and patent. Results show that our model can obviously improve cross-domain CWS, especially in the segmentation of domain-specific noun entities. The word F-measure increases by over 3.0% on four datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art semi-supervised and unsupervised cross-domain CWS approaches with a large margin. We make our data and code available on Github.

In order to learn universal sentence representations, previous methods focus on complex recurrent neural networks or supervised learning. In this paper, we propose a mean-max attention autoencoder (mean-max AAE) within the encoder-decoder framework. Our autoencoder rely entirely on the MultiHead self-attention mechanism to reconstruct the input sequence. In the encoding we propose a mean-max strategy that applies both mean and max pooling operations over the hidden vectors to capture diverse information of the input. To enable the information to steer the reconstruction process dynamically, the decoder performs attention over the mean-max representation. By training our model on a large collection of unlabelled data, we obtain high-quality representations of sentences. Experimental results on a broad range of 10 transfer tasks demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised single methods, including the classical skip-thoughts and the advanced skip-thoughts+LN model. Furthermore, compared with the traditional recurrent neural network, our mean-max AAE greatly reduce the training time.