Papers › Multi-style Generative Reading Comprehension

Multi-style Generative Reading Comprehension

8 Jan 2019ACL 2019 7arXiv:1901.02262archive 2025-07-28

Kyosuke Nishida, Itsumi Saito, Kosuke Nishida, Kazutoshi Shinoda, Atsushi Otsuka, Hisako Asano, Junji Tomita

This study tackles generative reading comprehension (RC), which consists of answering questions based on textual evidence and natural language generation (NLG). We propose a multi-style abstractive summarization model for question answering, called Masque. The proposed model has two key characteristics. First, unlike most studies on RC that have focused on extracting an answer span from the provided passages, our model instead focuses on generating a summary from the question and multiple passages. This serves to cover various answer styles required for real-world applications. Second, whereas previous studies built a specific model for each answer style because of the difficulty of acquiring one general model, our approach learns multi-style answers within a model to improve the NLG capability for all styles involved. This also enables our model to give an answer in the target style. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Q&A task and the Q&A + NLG task of MS MARCO 2.1 and the summary task of NarrativeQA. We observe that the transfer of the style-independent NLG capability to the target style is the key to its success.

PaperPDFConference PDF

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

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

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

Tasks

Abstractive Text SummarizationQuestion AnsweringReading ComprehensionText Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Question Answering MS MARCO Masque Q&A Style BLEU-1 43.77 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering MS MARCO Masque Q&A Style Rouge-L 52.2 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering NarrativeQA Masque (NarrativeQA + MS MARCO) BLEU-1 54.11 #1 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering NarrativeQA Masque (NarrativeQA + MS MARCO) BLEU-4 30.43 #1 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering NarrativeQA Masque (NarrativeQA + MS MARCO) METEOR 26.13 #1 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering NarrativeQA Masque (NarrativeQA + MS MARCO) Rouge-L 59.87 #1 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering NarrativeQA Masque (NarrativeQA only) BLEU-1 48.7 #3 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering NarrativeQA Masque (NarrativeQA only) BLEU-4 20.98 #3 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering NarrativeQA Masque (NarrativeQA only) METEOR 21.95 #3 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering NarrativeQA Masque (NarrativeQA only) Rouge-L 54.74 #3 of 10 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