Papers › Transformers to Learn Hierarchical Contexts in Multiparty Dialogue for Span-based...
Transformers to Learn Hierarchical Contexts in Multiparty Dialogue for Span-based Question Answering
Changmao Li, Jinho D. Choi
We introduce a novel approach to transformers that learns hierarchical representations in multiparty dialogue. First, three language modeling tasks are used to pre-train the transformers, token- and utterance-level language modeling and utterance order prediction, that learn both token and utterance embeddings for better understanding in dialogue contexts. Then, multi-task learning between the utterance prediction and the token span prediction is applied to fine-tune for span-based question answering (QA). Our approach is evaluated on the FriendsQA dataset and shows improvements of 3.8% and 1.4% over the two state-of-the-art transformer models, BERT and RoBERTa, respectively.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
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
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Question Answering | FriendsQA | Li and Choi - RoBERTa | EM | 53.5 | #3 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | FriendsQA | Li and Choi - RoBERTa | F1 | 69.6 | #3 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | FriendsQA | Li and Choi - BERT | EM | 46.8 | #5 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | FriendsQA | Li and Choi - BERT | F1 | 63.1 | #5 of 6 | 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.
Methods
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