Semi-supervised Question Retrieval with Gated Convolutions

Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2016, pages 1279–1289, San Diego, California, June 12-17, 2016. c⃝2016 Association for Computational Linguistics Semi-supervised Question Retrieval with Gated Convolutions Tao Lei Hrishikesh Joshi Regina Barzilay Tommi Jaakkola MIT CSAIL {taolei, hjoshi, regina, tommi}@csail.mit.edu Katerina Tymoshenko Alessandro Moschitti Llu´ıs M`arquez University of Trento Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU tymoshenko@disi.unitn.it {amoschitti, lmarquez}@qf.org.qa Abstract Question answering forums are rapidly grow- ing in size with no effective automated abil- ity to refer to and reuse answers already avail- able for previous posted questions. In this paper, we develop a methodology for find- ing semantically related questions. The task is difficult since 1) key pieces of informa- tion are often buried in extraneous details in the question body and 2) available annota- tions on similar questions are scarce and frag- mented. We design a recurrent and convo- lutional model (gated convolution) to effec- tively map questions to their semantic repre- sentations. The models are pre-trained within an encoder-decoder framework (from body to title) on the basis of the entire raw corpus, and fine-tuned discriminatively from limited annotations. Our evaluation demonstrates that our model yields substantial gains over a stan- dard IR baseline and various neural network architectures (including CNNs, LSTMs and GRUs).1 1 Introduction Question answering (QA) forums such as Stack Ex- change2 are rapidly expanding and already contain millions of questions. The expanding scope and cov- erage of these forums often leads to many dupli- cate and interrelated questions, resulting in the same questions being answered multiple times. By iden- tifying similar questions, we can potentially reuse 1Our code and data are available at https://github. com/taolei87/rcnn 2http://stackexchange.com/ Title: How can I boot Ubuntu from a USB? Body: I bought a Compaq pc with Windows 8 a few months ago and now I want to install Ubuntu but still keep Windows 8. I tried Webi but when my pc restarts it read ERROR 0x000007b. I know that Windows 8 has a thing about not letting you have Ubuntu but I still want to have both OS without actually losing all my data ... Title: When I want to install Ubuntu on my laptop I’ll have to erase all my data. “Alonge side windows” doesnt appear Body: I want to install Ubuntu from a Usb drive. It says I have to erase all my data but I want to install it along side Windows 8. The “Install alongside windows” option doesn’t appear. What appear is, ... Figure 1: A pair of similar questions. existing answers, reducing response times and un- necessary repeated work. Unfortunately in most fo- rums, the process of identifying and referring to ex- isting similar questions is done manually by forum participants with limited, scattered success. The task of automatically retrieving similar ques- tions to a given user’s question has recently attracted significant attention and has become a testbed for various representation learning approaches (Zhou et al., 2015; dos Santos et al., 2015). However, the task has proven to be quite challenging – for instance, dos Santos et al. …

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