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arXiv · 1804.07726

Phrase-Indexed Question Answering: A New Challenge for Scalable Document Comprehension

Minjoon Seo·Tom Kwiatkowski·Ankur P. Parikh·Ali Farhadi·Hannaneh Hajishirzi
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Abstract

We formalize a new modular variant of current question answering tasks by enforcing complete independence of the document encoder from the question encoder. This formulation addresses a key challenge in machine comprehension by requiring a standalone representation of the document discourse. It additionally leads to a significant scalability advantage since the encoding of the answer candidate phrases in the document can be pre-computed and indexed offline for efficient retrieval. We experiment with baseline models for the new task, which achieve a reasonable accuracy but significantly underperform unconstrained QA models. We invite the QA research community to engage in Phrase-Indexed Question Answering (PIQA, pika) for closing the gap. The leaderboard is at: nlp.cs.washington.edu/piqa

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Minjoon Seo, Tom Kwiatkowski, Ankur P. Parikh, Ali Farhadi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi. 2018-04-20. Phrase-Indexed Question Answering: A New Challenge for Scalable Document Comprehension. https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07726

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