Question Answering (State of the art)

Answer Sentence Selection

The task of answer sentence selection is designed for the open-domain question answering setting. Given a question and a set of candidate sentences, the task is to choose the correct sentence that contains the exact answer and can sufficiently support the answer choice.

• QA Answer Sentence Selection Dataset: labeled sentences using TREC QA track data, provided by Mengqiu Wang and first used in Wang et al. (2007).
• Over time, the original dataset diverged to two versions due to different pre-processing in recent publications: both have the same training set but their development and test sets differ. The Raw version has 82 questions in the development set and 100 questions in the test set; The Clean version (Wang and Ittycheriah et al. 2015, Tan et al. 2015, dos Santos et al. 2016, Wang et al. 2016) removed questions with no answers or with only positive/negative answers, thus has only 65 questions in the development set and 68 questions in the test set.
• Note: MAP/MRR scores on the two versions of TREC QA data (Clean vs Raw) are not comparable according to Rao et al. (2016).

Algorithm - Raw Version of TREC QA	Reference	MAP	MRR
Punyakanok (2004)	Wang et al. (2007)	0.419	0.494
Cui (2005)	Wang et al. (2007)	0.427	0.526
Wang (2007)	Wang et al. (2007)	0.603	0.685
H&S (2010)	Heilman and Smith (2010)	0.609	0.692
W&M (2010)	Wang and Manning (2010)	0.595	0.695
Yao (2013)	Yao et al. (2013)	0.631	0.748
S&M (2013)	Severyn and Moschitti (2013)	0.678	0.736
Shnarch (2013) - Backward	Shnarch (2013)	0.686	0.754
Yih (2013) - LCLR	Yih et al. (2013)	0.709	0.770
Yu (2014) - TRAIN-ALL bigram+count	Yu et al. (2014)	0.711	0.785
W&N (2015) - Three-Layer BLSTM+BM25	Wang and Nyberg (2015)	0.713	0.791
Feng (2015) - Architecture-II	Tan et al. (2015)	0.711	0.800
S&M (2015)	Severyn and Moschitti (2015)	0.746	0.808
Yang (2016) - Attention-Based Neural Matching Model	Yang et al. (2016)	0.750	0.811
Tay (2017) - Holographic Dual LSTM Architecture	Tay et al. (2017)	0.750	0.815
H&L (2016) - Pairwise Word Interaction Modelling	He and Lin (2016)	0.758	0.822
H&L (2015) - Multi-Perspective CNN	He and Lin (2015)	0.762	0.830
Tay (2017) - HyperQA (Hyperbolic Embeddings)	Tay et al. (2017)	0.770	0.825
Rao (2016) - PairwiseRank + Multi-Perspective CNN	Rao et al. (2016)	0.780	0.834
Rao (2019) - Hybrid Co-Attention Network (HCAN)	Rao et al. (2019)	0.774	0.843
Tayyar Madabushi (2018) - Question Classification + PairwiseRank + Multi-Perspective CNN	Tayyar Madabushi et al. (2018)	0.836	0.863
Kamath (2019) - Question Classification + RNN + Pre-Attention	Kamath et al. (2019)	0.852	0.891

Algorithm - Clean Version of TREC QA	Reference	MAP	MRR
W&I (2015)	Wang and Ittycheriah (2015)	0.746	0.820
Tan (2015) - QA-LSTM/CNN+attention	Tan et al. (2015)	0.728	0.832
dos Santos (2016) - Attentive Pooling CNN	dos Santos et al. (2016)	0.753	0.851
Wang et al. (2016) - L.D.C Model	Wang et al. (2016)	0.771	0.845
H&L (2015) - Multi-Perspective CNN	He and Lin (2015)	0.777	0.836
Tay et al. (2017) - HyperQA (Hyperbolic Embeddings)	Tay et al. (2017)	0.784	0.865
Rao et al. (2016) - PairwiseRank + Multi-Perspective CNN	Rao et al. (2016)	0.801	0.877
Wang et al. (2017) - BiMPM	Wang et al. (2017)	0.802	0.875
Bian et al. (2017) - Compare-Aggregate	Bian et al. (2017)	0.821	0.899
Shen et al. (2017) - IWAN	Shen et al. (2017)	0.822	0.889
Tran et al. (2018) - IWAN + sCARNN	Tran et al. (2018)	0.829	0.875
Tay et al. (2018) - Multi-Cast Attention Networks (MCAN)	Tay et al. (2018)	0.838	0.904
Tayyar Madabushi (2018) - Question Classification + PairwiseRank + Multi-Perspective CNN	Tayyar Madabushi et al. (2018)	0.865	0.904
Yoon et al. (2019) - Compare-Aggregate + LanguageModel + LatentClustering	Yoon et al. (2019)	0.868	0.928
Lai et al. (2019) - BERT + GSAMN + Transfer Learning	Lai et al. (2019)	0.914	0.957

References

• Vasin Punyakanok, Dan Roth, and Wen-Tau Yih. 2004. Mapping dependencies trees: An application to question answering. In Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA.
• Hang Cui, Renxu Sun, Keya Li, Min-Yen Kan, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2005. Question answering passage retrieval using dependency relations. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM-SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Salvador, Brazil.
• Wang, Mengqiu and Smith, Noah A. and Mitamura, Teruko. 2007. What is the Jeopardy Model? A Quasi-Synchronous Grammar for QA. In EMNLP-CoNLL 2007.
• Heilman, Michael and Smith, Noah A. 2010. Tree Edit Models for Recognizing Textual Entailments, Paraphrases, and Answers to Questions. In NAACL-HLT 2010.
• Wang, Mengqiu and Manning, Christopher. 2010. Probabilistic Tree-Edit Models with Structured Latent Variables for Textual Entailment and Question Answering. In COLING 2010.
• E. Shnarch. 2013. Probabilistic Models for Lexical Inference. Ph.D. thesis, Bar Ilan University.
• Yao, Xuchen and Van Durme, Benjamin and Callison-Burch, Chris and Clark, Peter. 2013. Answer Extraction as Sequence Tagging with Tree Edit Distance. In NAACL-HLT 2013.
• Yih, Wen-tau and Chang, Ming-Wei and Meek, Christopher and Pastusiak, Andrzej. 2013. Question Answering Using Enhanced Lexical Semantic Models. In ACL 2013.
• Severyn, Aliaksei and Moschitti, Alessandro. 2013. Automatic Feature Engineering for Answer Selection and Extraction. In EMNLP 2013.
• Lei Yu, Karl Moritz Hermann, Phil Blunsom, and Stephen Pulman. 2014. Deep Learning for Answer Sentence Selection. In NIPS deep learning workshop.
• Di Wang and Eric Nyberg. 2015. A Long Short-Term Memory Model for Answer Sentence Selection in Question Answering. In ACL 2015.
• Minwei Feng, Bing Xiang, Michael R. Glass, Lidan Wang, Bowen Zhou. 2015. Applying deep learning to answer selection: A study and an open task. In ASRU 2015.
• Aliaksei Severyn and Alessandro Moschitti. 2015. Learning to Rank Short Text Pairs with Convolutional Deep Neural Networks. In SIGIR 2015.
• Zhiguo Wang and Abraham Ittycheriah. 2015. FAQ-based Question Answering via Word Alignment. In eprint arXiv:1507.02628.
• Ming Tan, Cicero dos Santos, Bing Xiang & Bowen Zhou. 2015. LSTM-Based Deep Learning Models for Nonfactoid Answer Selection. In eprint arXiv:1511.04108.
• Cicero dos Santos, Ming Tan, Bing Xiang & Bowen Zhou. 2016. Attentive Pooling Networks. In eprint arXiv:1602.03609.
• Zhiguo Wang, Haitao Mi and Abraham Ittycheriah. 2016. Sentence Similarity Learning by Lexical Decomposition and Composition. In Coling 2016.
• Hua He, Kevin Gimpel and Jimmy Lin. 2015. Multi-Perspective Sentence Similarity Modeling with Convolutional Neural Networks. In EMNLP 2015.
• Hua He and Jimmy Lin. 2016. Pairwise Word Interaction Modeling with Deep Neural Networks for Semantic Similarity Measurement. In NAACL 2016.
• Liu Yang, Qingyao Ai, Jiafeng Guo, W. Bruce Croft. 2016. aNMM: Ranking Short Answer Texts with Attention-Based Neural Matching Model. In CIKM 2016.
• Jinfeng Rao, Hua He and Jimmy Lin. 2016. Noise-Contrastive Estimation for Answer Selection with Deep Neural Networks. In CIKM 2016.
• Yi Tay, Minh C. Phan, Luu Anh Tuan and Siu Cheung Hui. 2017 Learning to Rank Question Answer Pairs with Holographic Dual LSTM Architecture. In SIGIR 2017.
• Yi Tay, Luu Anh Tuan, Siu Cheung Hui. 2017 Enabling Efficient Question Answer Retrieval via Hyperbolic Neural Networks. In eprint arXiv: 1707.07847.
• Zhiguo Wang, Wael Hamza and Radu Florian. 2017. Bilateral Multi-Perspective Matching for Natural Language Sentences. In eprint arXiv:1702.03814.
• Weijie Bian, Si Li, Zhao Yang, Guang Chen, Zhiqing Lin. 2017. A Compare-Aggregate Model with Dynamic-Clip Attention for Answer Selection. In CIKM 2017.
• Gehui Shen, Yunlun Yang, Zhi-Hong Deng. 2017. Inter-Weighted Alignment Network for Sentence Pair Modeling.. In EMNLP 2017.
• Quan Hung Tran, Tuan Manh Lai, Gholamreza Haffari, Ingrid Zukerman, Trung Bui, Hung Bui, The Context-dependent Additive Recurrent Neural Net, In NAACL 2018
• Yi Tay, Luu Anh Tuan, Siu Cheung Hui, Multi-Cast Attention Networks, In KDD 2018
• Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Mark Lee and John Barnden. Integrating Question Classification and Deep Learning for improved Answer Selection, In COLING 2018
• Seunghyun Yoon, Franck Dernoncourt, Doo Soon Kim, Trung Bui, Kyomin Jung. 2019. A Compare-Aggregate Model with Latent Clustering for Answer Selection. In CIKM 2019.
• Sanjay Kamath, Brigitte Grau and Yue Ma. 2019. Predicting and Integrating Expected Answer Types into a Simple Recurrent Neural Network Model for Answer Sentence Selection. In CICLING 2019
• Jinfeng Rao, Linqing Liu, Yi Tay, Wei Yang, Peng Shi, Jimmy Lin, Bridging the Gap between Relevance Matching and Semantic Matching for Short Text Similarity Modeling, In EMNLP 2019
• Tuan Lai, Quan Hung Tran, Trung Bui, Daisuke Kihara, A Gated Self-attention Memory Network for Answer Selection, In EMNLP 2019