Papers › A Fully Attention-Based Information Retriever

A Fully Attention-Based Information Retriever

22 Oct 2018arXiv:1810.09580archive 2025-07-28

Alvaro Henrique Chaim Correia, Jorge Luiz Moreira Silva, Thiago de Castro Martins, Fabio Gagliardi Cozman

Recurrent neural networks are now the state-of-the-art in natural language processing because they can build rich contextual representations and process texts of arbitrary length. However, recent developments on attention mechanisms have equipped feedforward networks with similar capabilities, hence enabling faster computations due to the increase in the number of operations that can be parallelized. We explore this new type of architecture in the domain of question-answering and propose a novel approach that we call Fully Attention Based Information Retriever (FABIR). We show that FABIR achieves competitive results in the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) while having fewer parameters and being faster at both learning and inference than rival methods.

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Question Answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Question Answering SQuAD1.1 FABIR EM 67.744 #172 of 213 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering SQuAD1.1 FABIR F1 77.605 #172 of 213 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering SQuAD1.1 dev FABIR EM 65.1 #46 of 55 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering SQuAD1.1 dev FABIR F1 75.6 #46 of 55 Archive leaderboard report

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