RikiNet: Reading Wikipedia Pages for Natural Question Answering
This addresses the problem of natural language understanding for question answering from Wikipedia, representing a strong specific gain rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the challenge of reading long documents for open-domain question answering by introducing RikiNet, a model that achieves 74.3 F1 on long-answer and 57.9 F1 on short-answer tasks on the Natural Questions dataset, outperforming single human performance.
Reading long documents to answer open-domain questions remains challenging in natural language understanding. In this paper, we introduce a new model, called RikiNet, which reads Wikipedia pages for natural question answering. RikiNet contains a dynamic paragraph dual-attention reader and a multi-level cascaded answer predictor. The reader dynamically represents the document and question by utilizing a set of complementary attention mechanisms. The representations are then fed into the predictor to obtain the span of the short answer, the paragraph of the long answer, and the answer type in a cascaded manner. On the Natural Questions (NQ) dataset, a single RikiNet achieves 74.3 F1 and 57.9 F1 on long-answer and short-answer tasks. To our best knowledge, it is the first single model that outperforms the single human performance. Furthermore, an ensemble RikiNet obtains 76.1 F1 and 61.3 F1 on long-answer and short-answer tasks, achieving the best performance on the official NQ leaderboard