QuASE: Question-Answer Driven Sentence Encoding

Hangfeng He; Qiang Ning; Dan Roth

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arXiv · 1909.00333

QuASE: Question-Answer Driven Sentence Encoding

Hangfeng He·Qiang Ning·Dan Roth

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Abstract

Question-answering (QA) data often encodes essential information in many facets. This paper studies a natural question: Can we get supervision from QA data for other tasks (typically, non-QA ones)? For example, {\em can we use QAMR (Michael et al., 2017) to improve named entity recognition?} We suggest that simply further pre-training BERT is often not the best option, and propose the {\em question-answer driven sentence encoding (QuASE)} framework. QuASE learns representations from QA data, using BERT or other state-of-the-art contextual language models. In particular, we observe the need to distinguish between two types of sentence encodings, depending on whether the target task is a single- or multi-sentence input; in both cases, the resulting encoding is shown to be an easy-to-use plugin for many downstream tasks. This work may point out an alternative way to supervise NLP tasks.

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Hangfeng He, Qiang Ning, Dan Roth. 2019-09-01. QuASE: Question-Answer Driven Sentence Encoding. https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.00333

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