Papers › A Parallel-Hierarchical Model for Machine Comprehension on Sparse Data
A Parallel-Hierarchical Model for Machine Comprehension on Sparse Data
Adam Trischler, Zheng Ye, Xingdi Yuan, Jing He, Phillip Bachman, Kaheer Suleman
Understanding unstructured text is a major goal within natural language processing. Comprehension tests pose questions based on short text passages to evaluate such understanding. In this work, we investigate machine comprehension on the challenging {\it MCTest} benchmark. Partly because of its limited size, prior work on {\it MCTest} has focused mainly on engineering better features. We tackle the dataset with a neural approach, harnessing simple neural networks arranged in a parallel hierarchy. The parallel hierarchy enables our model to compare the passage, question, and answer from a variety of trainable perspectives, as opposed to using a manually designed, rigid feature set. Perspectives range from the word level to sentence fragments to sequences of sentences; the networks operate only on word-embedding representations of text. When trained with a methodology designed to help cope with limited training data, our Parallel-Hierarchical model sets a new state of the art for {\it MCTest}, outperforming previous feature-engineered approaches slightly and previous neural approaches by a significant margin (over 15\% absolute).
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Question Answering | MCTest-160 | syntax, frame, coreference, and word embedding features | Accuracy | 75.27% | #1 of 1 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | MCTest-500 | Parallel-Hierarchical | Accuracy | 71% | #1 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | MCTest-500 | syntax, frame, coreference, and word embedding features | Accuracy | 69.94% | #2 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
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