Papers › Large-scale Simple Question Answering with Memory Networks

Large-scale Simple Question Answering with Memory Networks

5 Jun 2015arXiv:1506.02075archive 2025-07-28

Antoine Bordes, Nicolas Usunier, Sumit Chopra, Jason Weston

Training large-scale question answering systems is complicated because training sources usually cover a small portion of the range of possible questions. This paper studies the impact of multitask and transfer learning for simple question answering; a setting for which the reasoning required to answer is quite easy, as long as one can retrieve the correct evidence given a question, which can be difficult in large-scale conditions. To this end, we introduce a new dataset of 100k questions that we use in conjunction with existing benchmarks. We conduct our study within the framework of Memory Networks (Weston et al., 2015) because this perspective allows us to eventually scale up to more complex reasoning, and show that Memory Networks can be successfully trained to achieve excellent performance.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

au1khan/FactQA mentioned on GitHub report
aukhanee/FactQA mentioned on GitHub report
facebookresearch/ParlAI mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Question AnsweringTransfer Learning

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

SimpleQuestions

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Question Answering Reverb Memory Networks (ensemble) Accuracy 68% #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering SimpleQuestions Memory Networks (ensemble) F1 63.9% #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering WebQuestions Memory Networks (ensemble) F1 42.2% #35 of 37 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections