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Interactive Machine Comprehension with Information Seeking Agents (arxiv.org)
2 points by sel1 on Aug 30, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Most of a reading passage is hidden, so the model must ask for glimpses of text to find what it needs, like searching the web instead of being handed the whole document. Training this way taught it to hunt for clues step by step.

Abstract

Existing machine reading comprehension (MRC) models do not scale effectively to real-world applications like web-level information retrieval and question answering (QA). We argue that this stems from the nature of MRC datasets: most of these are static environments wherein the supporting documents and all necessary information are fully observed. In this paper, we propose a simple method that reframes existing MRC datasets as interactive, partially observable environments. Specifically, we "occlude" the majority of a document's text and add context-sensitive commands that reveal "glimpses" of the hidden text to a model. We repurpose SQuAD and NewsQA as an initial case study, and then show how the interactive corpora can be used to train a model that seeks relevant information through sequential decision making. We believe that this setting can contribute in scaling models to web-level QA scenarios.

Xingdi Yuan, Jie Fu, Marc-Alexandre Cote, Yi Tay, Christopher Pal, Adam Trischler
arXiv:1908.10449 · cs.CL, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Aug 27, 2019 · updated Apr 16, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · ACL2020

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