Papers › Data Augmentation for BERT Fine-Tuning in Open-Domain Question Answering

Data Augmentation for BERT Fine-Tuning in Open-Domain Question Answering

14 Apr 2019arXiv:1904.06652archive 2025-07-28

Wei Yang, Yuqing Xie, Luchen Tan, Kun Xiong, Ming Li, Jimmy Lin

Recently, a simple combination of passage retrieval using off-the-shelf IR techniques and a BERT reader was found to be very effective for question answering directly on Wikipedia, yielding a large improvement over the previous state of the art on a standard benchmark dataset. In this paper, we present a data augmentation technique using distant supervision that exploits positive as well as negative examples. We apply a stage-wise approach to fine tuning BERT on multiple datasets, starting with data that is "furthest" from the test data and ending with the "closest". Experimental results show large gains in effectiveness over previous approaches on English QA datasets, and we establish new baselines on two recent Chinese QA datasets.

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Tasks

Data AugmentationOpen-Domain Question AnsweringPassage RetrievalQuestion AnsweringRetrieval

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Open-Domain Question Answering SQuAD1.1 dev BERTserini EM 50.2 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

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

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