Community-based question answering (CQA) websites represent an important source of information. As a result, the problem of matching the most valuable answers to their corresponding questions has become an increasingly popular research topic. We frame this task as a binary (relevant/irrelevant) classification problem, and present an adversarial training framework to alleviate label imbalance issue. We employ a generative model to iteratively sample a subset of challenging negative samples to fool our classification model. Both models are alternatively optimized using REINFORCE algorithm. The proposed method is completely different from previous ones, where negative samples in training set are directly used or uniformly down-sampled. Further, we propose using Multi-scale Matching which explicitly inspects the correlation between words and ngrams of different levels of granularity. We evaluate the proposed method on SemEval 2016 and SemEval 2017 datasets and achieves state-of-the-art or similar performance.
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
We address the problem of cross-language adaptation for question-question similarity reranking in community question answering, with the objective to port a system trained on one input language to another input language given labeled training data for the first language and only unlabeled data for the second language. In particular, we propose to use adversarial training of neural networks to learn high-level features that are discriminative for the main learning task, and at the same time are invariant across the input languages. The evaluation results show sizable improvements for our cross-…
While numerous methods have been proposed as defenses against adversarial examples in question answering (QA), these techniques are often model specific, require retraining of the model, and give only marginal improvements in performance over vanilla models. In this work, we present a simple model-agnostic approach to this problem that can be applied directly to any QA model without any retraining. Our method employs an explicit answer candidate reranking mechanism that scores candidate answers on the basis of their content overlap with the question before making the final prediction. Combined…
Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）；Yahoo Japan Corporation（雅虎日本公司）
In community-based question answering (CQA) platforms, it takes time for a user to get useful information from among many answers. Although one solution is an answer ranking method, the user still needs to read through the top-ranked answers carefully. This paper proposes a new task of selecting a diverse and non-redundant answer set rather than ranking the answers. Our method is based on determinantal point processes (DPPs), and it calculates the answer importance and similarity between answers by using BERT. We built a dataset focusing on a Japanese CQA site, and the experiments on this data…
Adapting models to new domain without finetuning is a challenging problem in deep learning. In this paper, we utilize an adversarial training framework for domain generalization in Question Answering (QA) task. Our model consists of a conventional QA model and a discriminator. The training is performed in the adversarial manner, where the two models constantly compete, so that QA model can learn domain-invariant features. We apply this approach in MRQA Shared Task 2019 and show better performance compared to the baseline model.
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Studio Ousia（Ousia工作室）
Adversarial evaluation stress tests a model's understanding of natural language. While past approaches expose superficial patterns, the resulting adversarial examples are limited in complexity and diversity. We propose human-in-the-loop adversarial generation, where human authors are guided to break models. We aid the authors with interpretations of model predictions through an interactive user interface. We apply this generation framework to a question answering task called Quizbowl, where trivia enthusiasts craft adversarial questions. The resulting questions are validated via live human--co…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
Community question answering (CQA) gains increasing popularity in both academy and industry recently. However, the redundancy and lengthiness issues of crowdsourced answers limit the performance of answer selection and lead to reading difficulties and misunderstandings for community users. To solve these problems, we tackle the tasks of answer selection and answer summary generation in CQA with a novel joint learning model. Specifically, we design a question-driven pointer-generator network, which exploits the correlation information between question-answer pairs to aid in attending the essent…
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）
A major challenge to the problem of community question answering is the lexical and semantic gap between the sentence representations. Some solutions to minimize this gap includes the introduction of extra parameters to deep models or augmenting the external handcrafted features. In this paper, we propose a novel attentive recurrent tensor network for solving the lexical and semantic gap in community question answering. We introduce token-level and phrase-level attention strategy that maps input sequences to the output using trainable parameters. Further, we use the tensor parameters to introd…
School of Computer Science, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences（基础科学研究学院计算机科学系）；School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran（德黑兰大学工程学院电气与计算机工程系）
Community Question Answering (CQA) forums provide answers for many real-life questions. Thanks to the large size, these forums are very popular among machine learning researchers. Automatic answer selection, answer ranking, question retrieval, expert finding, and fact-checking are example learning tasks performed using CQA data. In this paper, we present PerCQA, the first Persian dataset for CQA. This dataset contains the questions and answers crawled from the most well-known Persian forum. After data acquisition, we provide rigorous annotation guidelines in an iterative process, and then the …
University of Information Technology（信息技术大学）；VNU-HCM（胡志明市国家大学）
For the last two years, from 2020 to 2021, COVID-19 has broken disease prevention measures in many countries, including Vietnam, and negatively impacted various aspects of human life and the social community. Besides, the misleading information in the community and fake news about the pandemic are also serious situations. Therefore, we present the first Vietnamese community-based question answering dataset for developing question answering systems for COVID-19 called UIT-ViCoV19QA. The dataset comprises 4,500 question-answer pairs collected from trusted medical sources, with at least one answe…
IBM Research AI（IBM研究院AI）；Thomas J. Watson Research Center（托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
Recent approaches have exploited weaknesses in monolingual question answering (QA) models by adding adversarial statements to the passage. These attacks caused a reduction in state-of-the-art performance by almost 50%. In this paper, we are the first to explore and successfully attack a multilingual QA (MLQA) system pre-trained on multilingual BERT using several attack strategies for the adversarial statement reducing performance by as much as 85%. We show that the model gives priority to English and the language of the question regardless of the other languages in the QA pair. Further, we als…
Recent years have witnessed impressive advances in challenging multi-hop QA tasks. However, these QA models may fail when faced with some disturbance in the input text and their interpretability for conducting multi-hop reasoning remains uncertain. Previous adversarial attack works usually edit the whole question sentence, which has limited effect on testing the entity-based multi-hop inference ability. In this paper, we propose a multi-hop reasoning chain based adversarial attack method. We formulate the multi-hop reasoning chains starting from the query entity to the answer entity in the con…
Yonsei University（延世大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；NCSOFT（NCSoft公司）
The task of answering a question given a text passage has shown great developments on model performance thanks to community efforts in building useful datasets. Recently, there have been doubts whether such rapid progress has been based on truly understanding language. The same question has not been asked in the table question answering (TableQA) task, where we are tasked to answer a query given a table. We show that existing efforts, of using "answers" for both evaluation and supervision for TableQA, show deteriorating performances in adversarial settings of perturbations that do not affect t…
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia（西班牙国立远程教育大学）
Community Question Answering is the field of computational linguistics that deals with problems derived from the questions and answers posted to websites such as Quora or Stack Overflow. Among some of these problems we find the issue of ranking the multiple answers posted in reply to each question by how informative they are in the attempt to solve the original question. This work tries to advance the state of the art on answer ranking for community Question Answering by proceeding with a deep learning approach. We started off by creating a large data set of questions and answers posted to the…
College of Electrical Engineering；Computer Science\ Taiwan University, Taiwan
Spoken question answering (SQA) is challenging due to complex reasoning on top of the spoken documents. The recent studies have also shown the catastrophic impact of automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors on SQA. Therefore, this work proposes to mitigate the ASR errors by aligning the mismatch between ASR hypotheses and their corresponding reference transcriptions. An adversarial model is applied to this domain adaptation task, which forces the model to learn domain-invariant features the QA model can effectively utilize in order to improve the SQA results. The experiments successfully demo…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Amazon（亚马逊）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
We address jointly two important tasks for Question Answering in community forums: given a new question, (i) find related existing questions, and (ii) find relevant answers to this new question. We further use an auxiliary task to complement the previous two, i.e., (iii) find good answers with respect to the thread question in a question-comment thread. We use deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn meaningful task-specific embeddings, which we then incorporate into a conditional random field (CRF) model for the multitask setting, performing joint learning over a complex graph structure. While DN…
Community Question Answering forums such as Quora, Stackoverflow are rich knowledge resources, often catering to information on topics overlooked by major search engines. Answers submitted to these forums are often elaborated, contain spam, are marred by slurs and business promotions. It is difficult for a reader to go through numerous such answers to gauge community opinion. As a result summarization becomes a prioritized task for CQA forums. While a number of efforts have been made to summarize factoid CQA, little work exists in summarizing non-factoid CQA. We believe this is due to the lack…
Amazon Alexa（亚马逊Alexa）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Bloomberg L.P.（彭博有限合伙企业）
To bridge the gap between the capabilities of the state-of-the-art in factoid question answering (QA) and what users ask, we need large datasets of real user questions that capture the various question phenomena users are interested in, and the diverse ways in which these questions are formulated. We introduce ComQA, a large dataset of real user questions that exhibit different challenging aspects such as compositionality, temporal reasoning, and comparisons. ComQA questions come from the WikiAnswers community QA platform, which typically contains questions that are not satisfactorily answerab…
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen Graduate School（哈尔滨工业大学深圳研究生院）
In this paper, the answer selection problem in community question answering (CQA) is regarded as an answer sequence labeling task, and a novel approach is proposed based on the recurrent architecture for this problem. Our approach applies convolution neural networks (CNNs) to learning the joint representation of question-answer pair firstly, and then uses the joint representation as input of the long short-term memory (LSTM) to learn the answer sequence of a question for labeling the matching quality of each answer. Experiments conducted on the SemEval 2015 CQA dataset shows the effectiveness …
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
The widely used Fact-based Visual Question Answering (FVQA) dataset contains visually-grounded questions that require information retrieval using common sense knowledge graphs to answer. It has been observed that the original dataset is highly imbalanced and concentrated on a small portion of its associated knowledge graph. We introduce FVQA 2.0 which contains adversarial variants of test questions to address this imbalance. We show that systems trained with the original FVQA train sets can be vulnerable to adversarial samples and we demonstrate an augmentation scheme to reduce this vulnerabil…
Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；Sofia University（索菲亚大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，HBKU）
We transfer a key idea from the field of sentiment analysis to a new domain: community question answering (cQA). The cQA task we are interested in is the following: given a question and a thread of comments, we want to re-rank the comments so that the ones that are good answers to the question would be ranked higher than the bad ones. We notice that good vs. bad comments use specific vocabulary and that one can often predict the goodness/badness of a comment even ignoring the question, based on the comment contents only. This leads us to the idea to build a good/bad polarity lexicon as an anal…
Research Training Group AIPHES（AIPHES研究培训组）；Institute for Computational Linguistics（计算语言学研究所）；Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
We describe our system for finding good answers in a community forum, as defined in SemEval-2016, Task 3 on Community Question Answering. Our approach relies on several semantic similarity features based on fine-tuned word embeddings and topics similarities. In the main Subtask C, our primary submission was ranked third, with a MAP of 51.68 and accuracy of 69.94. In Subtask A, our primary submission was also third, with MAP of 77.58 and accuracy of 73.39.
Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
This paper studies the impact of different types of features applied to learning to re-rank questions in community Question Answering. We tested our models on two datasets released in SemEval-2016 Task 3 on "Community Question Answering". Task 3 targeted real-life Web fora both in English and Arabic. Our models include bag-of-words features (BoW), syntactic tree kernels (TKs), rank features, embeddings, and machine translation evaluation features. To the best of our knowledge, structural kernels have barely been applied to the question reranking task, where they have to model paraphrase relati…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
Despite recent progress, state-of-the-art question answering models remain vulnerable to a variety of adversarial attacks. While dynamic adversarial data collection, in which a human annotator tries to write examples that fool a model-in-the-loop, can improve model robustness, this process is expensive which limits the scale of the collected data. In this work, we are the first to use synthetic adversarial data generation to make question answering models more robust to human adversaries. We develop a data generation pipeline that selects source passages, identifies candidate answers, generate…
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（HBKU卡塔尔计算研究所）
In this paper, we developed a deep neural network (DNN) that learns to solve simultaneously the three tasks of the cQA challenge proposed by the SemEval-2016 Task 3, i.e., question-comment similarity, question-question similarity and new question-comment similarity. The latter is the main task, which can exploit the previous two for achieving better results. Our DNN is trained jointly on all the three cQA tasks and learns to encode questions and comments into a single vector representation shared across the multiple tasks. The results on the official challenge test set show that our approach p…
Knowledge Media Institute（知识媒体研究所）；The Open University（开放大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）
This paper addresses the problem of determining the best answer in Community-based Question Answering (CQA) websites by focussing on the content. In particular, we present a system, ACQUA [http://acqua.kmi.open.ac.uk], that can be installed onto the majority of browsers as a plugin. The service offers a seamless and accurate prediction of the answer to be accepted. Previous research on this topic relies on the exploitation of community feedback on the answers, which involves rating of either users (e.g., reputation) or answers (e.g. scores manually assigned to answers). We propose a new techni…
Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）
In this work we describe the system built for the three English subtasks of the SemEval 2016 Task 3 by the Department of Computer Science of the University of Houston (UH) and the Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology (PRHLT) research center - Universitat Polit`ecnica de Val`encia: UH-PRHLT. Our system represents instances by using both lexical and semantic-based similarity measures between text pairs. Our semantic features include the use of distributed representations of words, knowledge graphs generated with the BabelNet multilingual semantic network, and the FrameNet lexical da…
In the community question answering (CQA) system, the answer selection task aims to identify the best answer for a specific question, and thus is playing a key role in enhancing the service quality through recommending appropriate answers for new questions. Recent advances in CQA answer selection focus on enhancing the performance by incorporating the community information, particularly the expertise (previous answers) and authority (position in the social network) of an answerer. However, existing approaches for incorporating such information are limited in (a) only considering either the exp…
University of Twente（特文特大学）；University of Stavanger（斯塔万格大学）
Thousands of complex natural language questions are submitted to community question answering websites on a daily basis, rendering them as one of the most important information sources these days. However, oftentimes submitted questions are unclear and cannot be answered without further clarification questions by expert community members. This study is the first to investigate the complex task of classifying a question as clear or unclear, i.e., if it requires further clarification. We construct a novel dataset and propose a classification approach that is based on the notion of similar questi…
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”（圣克莱门特·奥里季斯基索菲亚大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Community Question Answering (cQA) forums are very popular nowadays, as they represent effective means for communities around particular topics to share information. Unfortunately, this information is not always factual. Thus, here we explore a new dimension in the context of cQA, which has been ignored so far: checking the veracity of answers to particular questions in cQA forums. As this is a new problem, we create a specialized dataset for it. We further propose a novel multi-faceted model, which captures information from the answer content (what is said and how), from the author profile (w…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（HBKU卡塔尔计算研究所）
We explore the applicability of machine translation evaluation (MTE) methods to a very different problem: answer ranking in community Question Answering. In particular, we adopt a pairwise neural network (NN) architecture, which incorporates MTE features, as well as rich syntactic and semantic embeddings, and which efficiently models complex non-linear interactions. The evaluation results show state-of-the-art performance, with sizeable contribution from both the MTE features and from the pairwise NN architecture.
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Baidu, Inc.（百度公司）
In the area of community question answering (CQA), answer selection and answer ranking are two tasks which are applied to help users quickly access valuable answers. Existing solutions mainly exploit the syntactic or semantic correlation between a question and its related answers (Q&A), where the multi-facet domain effects in CQA are still underexplored. In this paper, we propose a unified model, Enhanced Attentive Recurrent Neural Network (EARNN), for both answer selection and answer ranking tasks by taking full advantages of both Q&A semantics and multi-facet domain effects (i.e., topic effe…
University of Minnesota Twin Cities（明尼苏达大学双城分校）；Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）
Quality of questions and answers from community support websites (e.g. Microsoft Developers Network, Stackoverflow, Github, etc.) is difficult to define and a prediction model of quality questions and answers is even more challenging to implement. Previous works have addressed the question quality models and answer quality models separately using meta-features like number of up-votes, trustworthiness of the person posting the questions or answers, titles of the post, and context naive natural language processing features. However, there is a lack of an integrated question-answer quality model …
Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Qatar Living（卡塔尔生活）
Community Question Answering (cQA) provides new interesting research directions to the traditional Question Answering (QA) field, e.g., the exploitation of the interaction between users and the structure of related posts. In this context, we organized SemEval-2015 Task 3 on "Answer Selection in cQA", which included two subtasks: (a) classifying answers as "good", "bad", or "potentially relevant" with respect to the question, and (b) answering a YES/NO question with "yes", "no", or "unsure", based on the list of all answers. We set subtask A for Arabic and English on two relatively different cQ…
In this paper, we investigate whether text from a Community Question Answering (QA) platform can be used to predict and describe real-world attributes. We experiment with predicting a wide range of 62 demographic attributes for neighbourhoods of London. We use the text from QA platform of Yahoo! Answers and compare our results to the ones obtained from Twitter microblogs. Outcomes show that the correlation between the predicted demographic attributes using text from Yahoo! Answers discussions and the observed demographic attributes can reach an average Pearson correlation coefficient of \r{ho}…
Community Question Answering (cQA) forums have become a popular medium for soliciting direct answers to specific questions of users from experts or other experienced users on a given topic. However, for a given question, users sometimes have to sift through a large number of low-quality or irrelevant answers to find out the answer which satisfies their information need. To alleviate this, the problem of Answer Quality Prediction (AQP) aims to predict the quality of an answer posted in response to a forum question. Current AQP systems either learn models using - a) various hand-crafted features…
Developing methods to adversarially challenge NLP systems is a promising avenue for improving both model performance and interpretability. Here, we describe the approach of the team "longhorns" on Task 1 of the The First Workshop on Dynamic Adversarial Data Collection (DADC), which asked teams to manually fool a model on an Extractive Question Answering task. Our team finished first, with a model error rate of 62%. We advocate for a systematic, linguistically informed approach to formulating adversarial questions, and we describe the results of our pilot experiments, as well as our official su…
Multi-hop question answering requires a model to connect multiple pieces of evidence scattered in a long context to answer the question. In this paper, we show that in the multi-hop HotpotQA (Yang et al., 2018) dataset, the examples often contain reasoning shortcuts through which models can directly locate the answer by word-matching the question with a sentence in the context. We demonstrate this issue by constructing adversarial documents that create contradicting answers to the shortcut but do not affect the validity of the original answer. The performance of strong baseline models drops si…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
In adversarial data collection (ADC), a human workforce interacts with a model in real time, attempting to produce examples that elicit incorrect predictions. Researchers hope that models trained on these more challenging datasets will rely less on superficial patterns, and thus be less brittle. However, despite ADC's intuitive appeal, it remains unclear when training on adversarial datasets produces more robust models. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale controlled study focused on question answering, assigning workers at random to compose questions either (i) adversarially (with a model …
Community Question Answering (CQA) platforms contain plenty of CQA texts (i.e., questions and answers corresponding to the question) where named entities appear ubiquitously. In this paper, we define a new task of CQA entity linking (CQAEL) as linking the textual entity mentions detected from CQA texts with their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. This task can facilitate many downstream applications including expert finding and knowledge base enrichment. Traditional entity linking methods mainly focus on linking entities in news documents, and are suboptimal over this new task of CQA…
Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Recent techniques in Question Answering (QA) have gained remarkable performance improvement with some QA models even surpassed human performance. However, the ability of these models in truly understanding the language still remains dubious and the models are revealing limitations when facing adversarial examples. To strengthen the robustness of QA models and their generalization ability, we propose a representation Enhancement via Semantic and Context constraints (ESC) approach to improve the robustness of lexical embeddings. Specifically, we insert perturbations with semantic constraints and…
We apply a general recurrent neural network (RNN) encoder framework to community question answering (cQA) tasks. Our approach does not rely on any linguistic processing, and can be applied to different languages or domains. Further improvements are observed when we extend the RNN encoders with a neural attention mechanism that encourages reasoning over entire sequences. To deal with practical issues such as data sparsity and imbalanced labels, we apply various techniques such as transfer learning and multitask learning. Our experiments on the SemEval-2016 cQA task show 10% improvement on a MAP…
The article describes our submission to SemEval 2019 Task 8 on Fact-Checking in Community Forums. The systems under discussion participated in Subtask A: decide whether a question asks for factual information, opinion/advice or is just socializing. Our primary submission was ranked as the second one among all participants in the official evaluation phase. The article presents our primary solution: Deeply Regularized Residual Neural Network (DRR NN) with Universal Sentence Encoder embeddings. This is followed by a description of two contrastive solutions based on ensemble methods.
Standard accuracy metrics indicate that reading comprehension systems are making rapid progress, but the extent to which these systems truly understand language remains unclear. To reward systems with real language understanding abilities, we propose an adversarial evaluation scheme for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD). Our method tests whether systems can answer questions about paragraphs that contain adversarially inserted sentences, which are automatically generated to distract computer systems without changing the correct answer or misleading humans. In this adversarial sett…
Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)（阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所（Amii））；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
Duplicate question detection is an ongoing challenge in community question answering because semantically equivalent questions can have significantly different words and structures. In addition, the identification of duplicate questions can reduce the resources required for retrieval, when the same questions are not repeated. This study compares the performance of deep neural networks and gradient tree boosting, and explores the possibility of domain adaptation with transfer learning to improve the under-performing target domains for the text-pair duplicates classification task, using three he…
Instituto de Telecomunicações（电信研究所）；SiteGround Hosting EOOD（SiteGround托管有限责任公司）；MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
We present SemEval-2019 Task 8 on Fact Checking in Community Question Answering Forums, which features two subtasks. Subtask A is about deciding whether a question asks for factual information vs. an opinion/advice vs. just socializing. Subtask B asks to predict whether an answer to a factual question is true, false or not a proper answer. We received 17 official submissions for subtask A and 11 official submissions for Subtask B. For subtask A, all systems improved over the majority class baseline. For Subtask B, all systems were below a majority class baseline, but several systems were very …
Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Grammarly（Grammarly公司）；Meta AI
Community-based Question Answering (CQA), which allows users to acquire their desired information, has increasingly become an essential component of online services in various domains such as E-commerce, travel, and dining. However, an overwhelming number of CQA pairs makes it difficult for users without particular intent to find useful information spread over CQA pairs. To help users quickly digest the key information, we propose the novel CQA summarization task that aims to create a concise summary from CQA pairs. To this end, we first design a multi-stage data annotation process and create …
Product-specific community question answering platforms can greatly help address the concerns of potential customers. However, the user-provided answers on such platforms often vary a lot in their qualities. Helpfulness votes from the community can indicate the overall quality of the answer, but they are often missing. Accurately predicting the helpfulness of an answer to a given question and thus identifying helpful answers is becoming a demanding need. Since the helpfulness of an answer depends on multiple perspectives instead of only topical relevance investigated in typical QA tasks, commo…
When Question-Answering (QA) systems are deployed in the real world, users query them through a variety of interfaces, such as speaking to voice assistants, typing questions into a search engine, or even translating questions to languages supported by the QA system. While there has been significant community attention devoted to identifying correct answers in passages assuming a perfectly formed question, we show that components in the pipeline that precede an answering engine can introduce varied and considerable sources of error, and performance can degrade substantially based on these upstr…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（HBKU卡塔尔计算研究所）；MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Qatar Living（卡塔尔生活）
This paper describes the SemEval--2016 Task 3 on Community Question Answering, which we offered in English and Arabic. For English, we had three subtasks: Question--Comment Similarity (subtask A), Question--Question Similarity (B), and Question--External Comment Similarity (C). For Arabic, we had another subtask: Rerank the correct answers for a new question (D). Eighteen teams participated in the task, submitting a total of 95 runs (38 primary and 57 contrastive) for the four subtasks. A variety of approaches and features were used by the participating systems to address the different subtask…
Community based question answering platforms have attracted substantial users to share knowledge and learn from each other. As the rapid enlargement of CQA platforms, quantities of overlapped questions emerge, which makes users confounded to select a proper reference. It is urgent for us to take effective automated algorithms to reuse historical questions with corresponding answers. In this paper we focus on the problem with question retrieval, which aims to match historical questions that are relevant or semantically equivalent to resolve one s query directly. The challenges in this task are …
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）
We present Twin Answer Sentences Attack (TASA), an adversarial attack method for question answering (QA) models that produces fluent and grammatical adversarial contexts while maintaining gold answers. Despite phenomenal progress on general adversarial attacks, few works have investigated the vulnerability and attack specifically for QA models. In this work, we first explore the biases in the existing models and discover that they mainly rely on keyword matching between the question and context, and ignore the relevant contextual relations for answer prediction. Based on two biases above, TASA…
