Words or Characters? Fine-grained Gating for Reading Comprehension

Zhilin Yang, Bhuwan Dhingra, Ye Yuan, Junjie Hu, William W. Cohen, Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Abstract: Previous work combines word-level and character-level representations using concatenation or scalar weighting, which is suboptimal for high-level tasks like reading comprehension. We present a fine-grained gating mechanism to dynamically combine word-level and character-level representations based on properties of the words. We also extend the idea of fine-grained gating to modeling the interaction between questions and paragraphs for reading comprehension. Experiments show that our approach can improve the performance on reading comprehension tasks, achieving new state-of-the-art results on the Children's Book Test and Who Did What datasets. To demonstrate the generality of our gating mechanism, we also show improved results on a social media tag prediction task.

Conflicts: cmu.edu

Keywords: Natural language processing, Deep learning

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:1611.01724/code)