Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension

Minjoon Seo, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Ali Farhadi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi

Abstract: Machine comprehension (MC), answering a query about a given context paragraph, requires modeling complex interactions between the context and the query. Recently, attention mechanisms have been successfully extended to MC. Typically these methods use attention to focus on a small portion of the context and summarize it with a fixed-size vector, couple attentions temporally, and/or often form a uni-directional attention. In this paper we introduce the Bi-Directional Attention Flow (BIDAF) network, a multi-stage hierarchical process that represents the context at different levels of granularity and uses bi-directional attention flow mechanism to obtain a query-aware context representation without early summarization. Our experimental evaluations show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art results in Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) and CNN/DailyMail cloze test.

Conflicts: washington.edu, allenai.org

Keywords: Natural language processing, Deep learning

Community Implementations: [ 22 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:1611.01603/code)