Transfer Learning and Masked Generation for Answer Verbalization.

Sebastien Montella, Lina Maria Rojas-Barahona, Frederic Bechet, Johannes Heinecke, Alexis Nasr

Abstract: Structured Knowledge has recently emerged as an essential component to support fine-grained Question Answering (QA). In general, QA systems query a Knowledge Base (KB) to detect and extract the raw answers as final prediction. However, as lacking of context, language generation can offer a much informative and complete response. In this paper, we propose to combine the power of transfer learning and the advantage of entity placeholders to produce high-quality verbalization of extracted answers from a KB. We claim that such approach is especially well-suited for answer generation. Our experiments show 44.25%, 3.26% and 29.10% relative gain in BLEU over the state-of-the-art on the VQuAnDA, ParaQA and VANiLLa datasets, respectively. We additionally provide minor hallucinations corrections in VANiLLa standing for 5% of each of the training and testing set. We witness a median absolute gain of 0.81 SacreBLEU. This strengthens the importance of data quality when using automated evaluation.