English

Sequential Attention: A Context-Aware Alignment Function for Machine Reading

Computation and Language 2017-06-28 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

In this paper we propose a neural network model with a novel Sequential Attention layer that extends soft attention by assigning weights to words in an input sequence in a way that takes into account not just how well that word matches a query, but how well surrounding words match. We evaluate this approach on the task of reading comprehension (on the Who did What and CNN datasets) and show that it dramatically improves a strong baseline--the Stanford Reader--and is competitive with the state of the art.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.02269,
  title  = {Sequential Attention: A Context-Aware Alignment Function for Machine Reading},
  author = {Sebastian Brarda and Philip Yeres and Samuel R. Bowman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.02269},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

To appear in ACL 2017 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP. Contains additional experiments in section 4 and a revised Figure 1