English

An Attention Mechanism for Answer Selection Using a Combined Global and Local View

Computation and Language 2017-09-21 v4

Abstract

We propose a new attention mechanism for neural based question answering, which depends on varying granularities of the input. Previous work focused on augmenting recurrent neural networks with simple attention mechanisms which are a function of the similarity between a question embedding and an answer embeddings across time. We extend this by making the attention mechanism dependent on a global embedding of the answer attained using a separate network. We evaluate our system on InsuranceQA, a large question answering dataset. Our model outperforms current state-of-the-art results on InsuranceQA. Further, we visualize which sections of text our attention mechanism focuses on, and explore its performance across different parameter settings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.01378,
  title  = {An Attention Mechanism for Answer Selection Using a Combined Global and Local View},
  author = {Yoram Bachrach and Andrej Zukov-Gregoric and Sam Coope and Ed Tovell and Bogdan Maksak and Jose Rodriguez and Conan McMurtie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.01378},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:38:33.014Z