This paper describes the models designated for the MEDIQA 2019 shared tasks by the team PANLP. We take advantages of the recent advances in pre-trained bidirectional transformer language models such as BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) and MT-DNN (Liu et al., 2019b). We find that pre-trained language models can significantly outperform traditional deep learning models. Transfer learning from the NLI task to the RQE task is also experimented, which proves to be useful in improving the results of fine-tuning MT-DNN large. A knowledge distillation process is implemented, to distill the knowledge contained in a set of models and transfer it into an single model, whose performance turns out to be comparable with that obtained by the ensemble of that set of models. Finally, for test submissions, model ensemble and a re-ranking process are implemented to boost the performances. Our models participated in all three tasks and ranked the 1st place for the RQE task, and the 2nd place for the NLI task, and also the 2nd place for the QA task.

To solve the shared tasks of COIN: COmmonsense INference in Natural Language Processing) Workshop in , we need explore the impact of knowledge representation in modeling commonsense knowledge to boost performance of machine reading comprehension beyond simple text matching. There are two approaches to represent knowledge in the low-dimensional space. The first is to leverage large-scale unsupervised text corpus to train fixed or contextual language representations. The second approach is to explicitly express knowledge into a knowledge graph (KG), and then fit a model to represent the facts in the KG. We have experimented both (a) improving the fine-tuning of pre-trained language models on a task with a small dataset size, by leveraging datasets of similar tasks; and (b) incorporating the distributional representations of a KG onto the representations of pre-trained language models, via simply concatenation or multi-head attention. We find out that: (a) for task 1, first fine-tuning on larger datasets like RACE (Lai et al., 2017) and SWAG (Zellersetal.,2018), and then fine-tuning on the target task improve the performance significantly; (b) for task 2, we find out the incorporating a KG of commonsense knowledge, WordNet (Miller, 1995) into the Bert model (Devlin et al., 2018) is helpful, however, it will hurts the performace of XLNET (Yangetal.,2019), a more powerful pre-trained model. Our approaches achieve the state-of-the-art results on both shared task’s official test data, outperforming all the other submissions.