Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Maluuba Inc.

Xingdi Yuan

Adam Trischler

Philip Bachman

Zheng Ye

Alessandro Sordoni

Tong Wang

Sandeep Subramanian

Described herein are systems and methods for providing a natural language comprehension system that employs a two-stage process for machine comprehension of text. The first stage indicates words in one or more text passages that potentially answer a question. The first stage outputs a set of candidate answers for the question, along with a first probability of correctness for each candidate answer. The second stage forms one or more hypotheses by inserting each candidate answer into the question and determines whether a sematic relationship exists between each hypothesis and each sentence in the text. The second processing circuitry generates a second probability of correctness for each candidate answer and combines the first probability with the second probability to produce a score that is used to rank the candidate answers. The candidate answer with the highest score is selected as a predicted answer.

Machine comprehension of unstructured text

A method, system, and storage device storing a computer program, for generating questions based on provided content, such as, for example, a document having words. The method comprises automatically estimating the probability of interesting phrases in the provided content, and generating a question in natural language based on the estimating. In one example embodiment herein, the estimating includes predicting the interesting phrases as answers, and the estimating is performed by a neural model. The method further comprises conditioning a question generation model based on the interesting phrases predicted in the predicting, the question generation model generating the question. The method also can include training the neural model. In one example, the method further comprises identifying start and end locations of the phrases in the provided content, and the identifying includes performing a dot product attention mechanism parameterizing a probability distribution.

Neural models for key phrase detection and question generation

Examples of the present disclosure provide systems and methods relating to a machine comprehension test with a learning-based approach, harnessing neural networks arranged in a parallel hierarchy. This parallel hierarchy enables the model to compare the passage, question, and answer from a variety of perspectives, as opposed to using a manually designed set of features. Perspectives may range from the word level to sentence fragments to sequences of sentences, and networks operate on word-embedding representations of text. A training methodology for small data is also provided.

Parallel-hierarchical model for machine comprehension on small data

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Xingdi Yuan