Select, Answer and Explain: Interpretable Multi-hop Reading Comprehension over Multiple Documents

By Ming Tu, Kevin Huang, Guangtao Wang, Jing Huang, Xiaodong He, Bowen Zhou. 2019

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Interpretable multi-hop reading comprehension (RC) over multiple documents is a challenging problem because it demands reasoning over multiple information sources and explaining the answer prediction by providing supporting evidences. In this paper, we propose an effective and interpretable Select, Answer and Explain (SAE) system to solve the multi-document RC problem. Our system first filters out answer-unrelated documents and thus reduce the amount of distraction information. This is achieved by a document classifier trained with a novel pairwise learning-to-rank loss. The selected answer-related documents are then input to a model to jointly predict the answer and supporting sentences. The model is optimized with a multi-task learning objective on both token level for answer prediction and sentence level for supporting sentences prediction, together with an attention-based interaction between these two tasks. Evaluated on HotpotQA, a challenging multi-hop RC data set, the proposed SAE system achieves top competitive performance in distractor setting compared to other existing systems on the leaderboard.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Information Systems, Information Retrieval & Search, Natural Language Processing

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

  1. Mohit Bansal
  2. Ashish Sabharwal
  3. Jianfeng Gao
  4. Hannaneh Hajishirzi
  5. Tushar Khot
  6. Xipeng Qiu
  7. Percy Liang
  8. Peter Clark

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

  1. Ashish Sabharwal
  2. Zhe Gan
  3. Tushar Khot
  4. Mohit Bansal
  5. Dacheng Tao
  6. Jingjing Liu
  7. Luc Van Gool
  8. Xipeng Qiu

In Information Systems

  1. Ashish Sabharwal
  2. Tushar Khot
  3. Peter Clark
  4. Daniel Khashabi
  5. Bo Li
  6. Niranjan Balasubramanian
  7. Harsh Trivedi
  8. Kyle Richardson

In Information Retrieval & Search

  1. Ashish Sabharwal
  2. Tushar Khot
  3. Peter Clark
  4. Daniel Khashabi
  5. Shuohang Wang
  6. Iz Beltagy
  7. Bowen Zhou
  8. Zhe Gan

In Natural Language Processing

  1. Ashish Sabharwal
  2. Tushar Khot
  3. Peter Clark
  4. Daniel Khashabi
  5. Hannaneh Hajishirzi
  6. Xipeng Qiu
  7. Jianfeng Gao
  8. Mohit Bansal

Citations in the corpus