Papers › Dynamic Integration of Background Knowledge in Neural NLU Systems

Dynamic Integration of Background Knowledge in Neural NLU Systems

8 Jun 2017ICLR 2018 1arXiv:1706.02596archive 2025-07-28

Dirk Weissenborn, Tomáš Kočiský, Chris Dyer

Common-sense and background knowledge is required to understand natural language, but in most neural natural language understanding (NLU) systems, this knowledge must be acquired from training corpora during learning, and then it is static at test time. We introduce a new architecture for the dynamic integration of explicit background knowledge in NLU models. A general-purpose reading module reads background knowledge in the form of free-text statements (together with task-specific text inputs) and yields refined word representations to a task-specific NLU architecture that reprocesses the task inputs with these representations. Experiments on document question answering (DQA) and recognizing textual entailment (RTE) demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the approach. Analysis shows that our model learns to exploit knowledge in a semantically appropriate way.

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Tasks

Common Sense ReasoningNatural Language InferenceNatural Language UnderstandingQuestion AnsweringRTE

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Question Answering TriviaQA Reading Twice for NLU EM 50.56 #44 of 56 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering TriviaQA Reading Twice for NLU F1 56.73 #44 of 56 Archive leaderboard report

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