An Understanding-oriented Robust Machine Reading Comprehension Model

Feiliang Ren, Yongkang Liu, Bochao Li, Shilei Liu, Bingchao Wang, Jiaqi Wang, Chunchao Liu, Qi Ma

Abstract: Although existing machine reading comprehension models are making rapid progress on many datasets, they are far from robust. In this article, we propose an understanding-oriented machine reading comprehension model to address three kinds of robustness issues, which are over-sensitivity, over-stability, and generalization. Specifically, we first use a natural language inference module to help the model understand the accurate semantic meanings of input questions to address the issues of over-sensitivity and over-stability. Then, in the machine reading comprehension module, we propose a memory-guided multi-head attention method that can further well understand the semantic meanings of input questions and passages. Third, we propose a multi-language learning mechanism to address the issue of generalization. Finally, these modules are integrated with a multi-task learning-based method. We evaluate our model on three benchmark datasets that are designed to measure models’ robustness, including DuReader (robust) and two SQuAD-related datasets. Extensive experiments show that our model can well address the mentioned three kinds of robustness issues. And it achieves much better results than the compared state-of-the-art models on all these datasets under different evaluation metrics, even under some extreme and unfair evaluations. The source code of our work is available at https://github.com/neukg/RobustMRC.