U-Net: Machine Reading Comprehension with Unanswerable Questions

12 Oct 2018  ·  Fu Sun, Linyang Li, Xipeng Qiu, Yang Liu ·

Machine reading comprehension with unanswerable questions is a new challenging task for natural language processing. A key subtask is to reliably predict whether the question is unanswerable. In this paper, we propose a unified model, called U-Net, with three important components: answer pointer, no-answer pointer, and answer verifier. We introduce a universal node and thus process the question and its context passage as a single contiguous sequence of tokens. The universal node encodes the fused information from both the question and passage, and plays an important role to predict whether the question is answerable and also greatly improves the conciseness of the U-Net. Different from the state-of-art pipeline models, U-Net can be learned in an end-to-end fashion. The experimental results on the SQuAD 2.0 dataset show that U-Net can effectively predict the unanswerability of questions and achieves an F1 score of 71.7 on SQuAD 2.0.

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Datasets


Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Question Answering SQuAD2.0 Unet (ensemble) EM 71.417 # 248
F1 74.869 # 248
Question Answering SQuAD2.0 dev U-Net F1 74.0 # 12
EM 70.3 # 11

Methods