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Evaluating Co-reference Chains Based Conversation History in Conversational Question Answering

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Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1215))

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of using co-reference chains based conversational history against the use of entire conversation history for conversational question answering (CoQA) task. The QANet model is modified to include conversational history and NeuralCoref is used to obtain co-reference chains based conversation history. The results of the study indicates that in spite of the availability of a large proportion of co-reference links in CoQA, the abstract nature of questions in CoQA renders it difficult to obtain correct mapping of co-reference related conversation history, and thus results in lower performance compared to systems that use entire conversation history. The effect of co-reference resolution examined on various domains and different conversation length, shows that co-reference resolution across questions is helpful for certain domains and medium-length conversations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/huggingface/neuralcoref.

  2. 2.

    Listed on March 29, 2019.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/huggingface/neuralcoref.

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Correspondence to Angrosh Mandya .

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Mandya, A., Bollegala, D., Coenen, F. (2020). Evaluating Co-reference Chains Based Conversation History in Conversational Question Answering. In: Nguyen, LM., Phan, XH., Hasida, K., Tojo, S. (eds) Computational Linguistics. PACLING 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1215. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6168-9_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6168-9_24

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-6167-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-6168-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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