Leader-Generator Net: Dividing Skill and Implicitness for Conquering FairytaleQA

Wei Peng, Wanshui Li, Yue Hu

Abstract: Machine reading comprehension requires systems to understand the given passage and answer questions. Previous methods mainly focus on the interaction between the question and passage. However, they ignore the deep exploration of cognitive elements behind questions, such as fine-grained reading skills (this paper focuses on narrative comprehension skills) and implicitness or explicitness of the question (whether the answer can be found in the passage). Grounded in prior literature on reading comprehension, the understanding of a question is a complex process where human beings need to understand the semantics of the question, use different reading skills for different questions, and then judge the implicitness of the question. To this end, a simple but effective Leader-Generator Network is proposed to explicitly separate and extract fine-grained reading skills and the implicitness or explicitness of the question. Specifically, the proposed skill leader accurately captures the semantic representation of fine-grained reading skills with contrastive learning. And the implicitness-aware pointer-generator adaptively extracts or generates the answer based on the implicitness or explicitness of the question. Furthermore, to validate the generalizability of the methodology, we annotate a new dataset named NarrativeQA 1.1. Experiments on the FairytaleQA and NarrativeQA 1.1 show that the proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance (about 5% gain on Rouge-L) on the question answering task. Our annotated data and code are available at https://github.com/pengwei-iie/Leader-Generator-Net.