Cited by 44Topic ModelingMultimodal Machine Learning ApplicationsInformation Retrieval and Search Behavior

Recurrent Chunking Mechanisms for Long-Text Machine Reading Comprehension

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Gong, Hongyu, Shen, Yelong, Yu, Dian, Chen, Jianshu, Yu, Dong·2020·Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Abstract

In this paper, we study machine reading comprehension (MRC) on long texts, where a model takes as inputs a lengthy document and a question and then extracts a text span from the document as an answer.State-of-the-art models tend to use a pretrained transformer model (e.g., BERT) to encode the joint contextual information of document and question.However, these transformer-based models can only take a fixed-length (e.g., 512) text as its input.To deal with even longer text inputs, previous approaches usually chunk them into equally-spaced segments and predict answers based on each segment independently without considering the information from other segments.As a result, they may form segments that fail to cover the correct answer span or retain insufficient contexts around it, which significantly degrades the performance.Moreover, they are less capable of answering questions that need cross-segment information.We propose to let a model learn to chunk in a more flexible way via reinforcement learning: a model can decide the next segment that it wants to process in either direction.We also employ recurrent mechanisms to enable information to flow across segments.Experiments on three MRC datasets -CoQA, QuAC, and TriviaQA -demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed recurrent chunking mechanisms: we can obtain segments that are more likely to contain complete answers and at the same time provide sufficient contexts around the ground truth answers for better predictions.

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Registry

Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.603

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  • Prior research has effectively leveraged context compression techniques such as retrieval and truncation to address long text tasks with pretrained language models.

    “Prior research has effectively leveraged context compression techniques such as retrieval and truncation to address long text tasks with pretrained language models (Gong et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2022; Zhao et al., 2022).”

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Authors
Gong, H., Shen, Y., Yu, D., Chen, J., & Yu, D.
Affiliations
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
  • Microsoft (United States) (US)
Corresponding author
Gong, Hongyu
Venue
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Published
2020
Pages
6751-6761
ISSN
0736-587X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3035391452
Cited by
42
References
35
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 3
FWCI
2.87
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
Keywords
chunking, reinforcement learning, segment selection, QuAC, TriviaQA

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