Discriminative Question Answering via Cascade Prompt Learning and Sentence Level Attention Mechanism

Abstract

Question answering (QA) systems are designed to answer questions based on given information or with the help of external information. Recent advances in QA systems are overwhelmingly contributed by deep learning techniques, which have been employed in a wide range of fields such as finance, sports and biomedicine. For generative QA in open-domain QA, although deep learning can leverage massive data to learn meaningful feature representations and generate free text as answers, there are still problems to limit the length and content of answers. To alleviate this problem, we focus on the variant YNQA of generative QA and propose a model CasATT (cascade prompt learning framework with the sentence-level attention mechanism). In the CasATT, we excavate text semantic information from document level to sentence level and mine evidence accurately from large-scale documents by retrieval and ranking, and answer questions with ranked candidates by discriminative question answering. Our experiments on several datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the CasATT over state-of-the-art baselines, whose accuracy score can achieve 93.1% on IR&QA Competition dataset and 90.5% on BoolQ dataset.