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Answer selection is an essential step in a question answering (QA) system. Traditional methods for this task mainly focus on developing linguistic features that are limited in practice. With the great success of deep learning method in distributed text representation, deep learning-based answer selection approaches have been well investigated, which mainly employ only one neural network, i.e., convolutional neural network (CNN) or long short term memory (LSTM), leading to failures in extracting some rich sentence features. Thus, in this paper, we propose a collaborative learning-based answer selection model (QA-CL), where we deploy a parallel training architecture to collaboratively learn the initial word vector matrix of the sentence by CNN and bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) at the same time. In addition, we extend our model by incorporating the sentence embedding generated by the QA-CL model into a joint distributed sentence representation using a strong unsupervised baseline weight removal (WR), i.e., the QA-CLWR model. We evaluate our proposals on a popular QA dataset, InsuranceQA. The experimental results indicate that our proposed answer selection methods can produce a better performance compared with several strong baselines. Finally, we investigate the models’ performance with respect to different question types and find that question types with a medium number of questions have a better and more stable performance than those types with too large or too small number of questions.

Answer selection is a crucial subtask in the question answering (QA) system. Conventional avenues for this task mainly concentrate on developing linguistic tools that are limited in both performance and practicability. Answer selection approaches based on deep learning have been well investigated with the tremendous success of deep learning in natural language processing. However, the traditional neural networks employed in existing answer selection models, i.e., recursive neural network or convolutional neural network, typically suffer from obtaining the global text information due to their operating mechanisms. The recent Transformer neural network is considered to be good at extracting the global information by employing only self-attention mechanism. Thus, in this paper, we design a Transformer-based neural network for answer selection, where we deploy a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) behind the Transformer to acquire both global information and sequential features in the question or answer sentence. Different from the original Transformer, our Transformer-based network focuses on sentence embedding rather than the seq2seq task. In addition, we employ a BiLSTM rather than utilizing the position encoding to incorporate sequential features as the universal Transformer does. Furthermore, we apply three aggregated strategies to generate sentence embeddings for question and answer, i.e., the weighted mean pooling, the max pooling, and the attentive pooling, leading to three corresponding Transformer-based models, i.e., QA-TF $_{{W\!P}}$ , QA-TF $_{{M\!P}}$ , and QA-TF $_{{A\!P}}$ , respectively. Finally, we evaluate our proposals on a popular QA dataset WikiQA. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed Transformer-based answer selection models can produce a better performance compared with several competitive baselines. In detail, our best model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline by up to 2.37%, 2.83%, and 3.79% in terms of MAP, MRR, and accuracy, respectively.

Answer selection focuses on selecting the correct answer for a question. Most previous work on answer selection achieves good performance by employing an RNN, which processes all question and answer sentences with the same feature extractor regardless of the sentence length. These methods often encounter the problem of long-term dependencies. To address this issue, we propose a Length-adaptive Neural Network (LaNN) for answer selection that can auto-select a neural feature extractor according to the length of the input sentence. In particular, we propose a flexible neural structure that applies a BiLSTM-based feature extractor for short sentences and a Transformer-based feature extractor for long sentences. To the best of our knowledge, LaNN is the first neural network structure that can auto-select the feature extraction mechanism based on the input. We quantify the improvements of LaNN against several competitive baselines on the public WikiQA dataset, showing significant improvements over the state-of-the-art.