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arXiv · 2105.04241

ReadTwice: Reading Very Large Documents with Memories

Yury Zemlyanskiy·Joshua Ainslie·Michiel de Jong·Philip Pham·Ilya Eckstein·Fei Sha
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Abstract

Knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering often require assimilating information from different sections of large inputs such as books or article collections. We propose ReadTwice, a simple and effective technique that combines several strengths of prior approaches to model long-range dependencies with Transformers. The main idea is to read text in small segments, in parallel, summarizing each segment into a memory table to be used in a second read of the text. We show that the method outperforms models of comparable size on several question answering (QA) datasets and sets a new state of the art on the challenging NarrativeQA task, with questions about entire books. Source code and pre-trained checkpoints for ReadTwice can be found at https://goo.gle/research-readtwice.

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Yury Zemlyanskiy, Joshua Ainslie, Michiel de Jong, Philip Pham, Ilya Eckstein, Fei Sha. 2021-05-10. ReadTwice: Reading Very Large Documents with Memories. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.04241

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