EA Reader: Enhance Attentive Reader for Cloze-Style Question Answering via Multi-Space Context Fusion

Abstract Query-document semantic interactions are essential for the success of many cloze-style question answering models. Recently, researchers have proposed several attention-based methods to predict the answer by focusing on appropriate subparts of the context document. In this paper, we design a novel module to produce the query-aware context vector, named Multi-Space based Context Fusion (MSCF), with the following considerations: (1) interactions are applied across multiple latent semantic spaces; (2) attention is measured at bit level, not at token level. Moreover, we extend MSCF to the multi-hop architecture. This unified model is called Enhanced Attentive Reader (EA Reader). During the iterative inference process, the reader is equipped with a novel memory update rule and maintains the understanding of documents through read, update and write operations. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. Our results demonstrate that EA Reader outperforms state-of-the-art models.