Papers › Context-Aware Transformer Pre-Training for Answer Sentence Selection

Context-Aware Transformer Pre-Training for Answer Sentence Selection

24 May 2023arXiv:2305.15358archive 2025-07-28

Luca Di Liello, Siddhant Garg, Alessandro Moschitti

Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) is a core component for building an accurate Question Answering pipeline. AS2 models rank a set of candidate sentences based on how likely they answer a given question. The state of the art in AS2 exploits pre-trained transformers by transferring them on large annotated datasets, while using local contextual information around the candidate sentence. In this paper, we propose three pre-training objectives designed to mimic the downstream fine-tuning task of contextual AS2. This allows for specializing LMs when fine-tuning for contextual AS2. Our experiments on three public and two large-scale industrial datasets show that our pre-training approaches (applied to RoBERTa and ELECTRA) can improve baseline contextual AS2 accuracy by up to 8% on some datasets.

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Tasks

Question AnsweringSentence

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Question Answering TrecQA Contextual DeBERTa-V3-Large + SSP MAP 0.919 #4 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering TrecQA Contextual DeBERTa-V3-Large + SSP MRR 0.945 #4 of 13 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionRoBERTaSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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