1. Constrained BERT BiLSTM CRF for understanding multi-sentence entity-seeking questions
- Author
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Danish Contractor, Barun Patra, null Mausam, and Parag Singla
- Subjects
Conditional random field ,Linguistics and Language ,Vocabulary ,Parsing ,Computer science ,business.industry ,media_common.quotation_subject ,02 engineering and technology ,computer.software_genre ,Language and Linguistics ,Task (project management) ,Domain (software engineering) ,Artificial Intelligence ,020204 information systems ,Schema (psychology) ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,Question answering ,020201 artificial intelligence & image processing ,Artificial intelligence ,business ,computer ,Software ,Sentence ,Natural language processing ,media_common - Abstract
We present the novel task of understanding multi-sentenceentity-seekingquestions (MSEQs), that is, the questions that may be expressed in multiple sentences, and that expect one or more entities as an answer. We formulate the problem of understanding MSEQs as a semantic labeling task over an open representation that makes minimal assumptions about schema or ontology-specific semantic vocabulary. At the core of our model, we use a BiLSTM (bidirectional LSTM) conditional random field (CRF), and to overcome the challenges of operating with low training data, we supplement it by using BERT embeddings, hand-designed features, as well as hard and soft constraints spanning multiple sentences. We find that this results in a 12–15 points gain over a vanilla BiLSTM CRF. We demonstrate the strengths of our work using the novel task of answering real-world entity-seeking questions from the tourism domain. The use of our labels helps answer 36% more questions with 35% more (relative) accuracy as compared to baselines. We also demonstrate how our framework can rapidly enable the parsing of MSEQs in an entirely new domain with small amounts of training data and little change in the semantic representation.
- Published
- 2020