CAT-BERT: A Context-Aware Transferable BERT Model for Multi-turn Machine Reading Comprehension

Cen Chen, Xinjing Huang, Feng Ji, Chengyu Wang, Minghui Qiu, Jun Huang, Yin Zhang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is an important NLP task with the goal of extracting answers to user questions from background passages. For conversational applications, modeling the contexts under the multi-turn setting is highly necessary for MRC, which has drawn great attention recently. Past studies on multi-turn MRC usually focus on a single domain, ignoring the fact that knowledge in different MRC tasks are transferable. To address this issue, we present a unified framework to model both single-turn and multi-turn MRC tasks which allows knowledge sharing from different source MRC tasks to help solve the target MRC task. Specifically, the Context-Aware Transferable Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (CAT-BERT) model is proposed, which jointly learns to solve both single-turn and multi-turn MRC tasks in a single pre-trained language model. In this model, both history questions and answers are encoded into the contexts for the multi-turn setting. To capture the task-level importance of different layer outputs, a task-specific attention layer is further added to the CAT-BERT outputs, reflecting the positions that the model should pay attention to for a specific MRC task. Extensive experimental results and ablation studies show that CAT-BERT achieves competitive results in multi-turn MRC tasks, outperforming strong baselines.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationDatabase Systems for Advanced Applications - 26th International Conference, DASFAA 2021, Proceedings
EditorsChristian S. Jensen, Ee-Peng Lim, De-Nian Yang, Chia-Hui Chang, Jianliang Xu, Wen-Chih Peng, Jen-Wei Huang, Chih-Ya Shen
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages152-167
Number of pages16
ISBN (Print)9783030731960
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event26th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2021 - Taipei, Taiwan, Province of China
Duration: 11 Apr 202114 Apr 2021

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12682 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference26th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2021
Country/TerritoryTaiwan, Province of China
CityTaipei
Period11/04/2114/04/21

Keywords

  • Machine reading comprehension
  • Pre-trained language model
  • Question answering
  • Transfer learning

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