Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

2-2020

Abstract

Community question answering (CQA) gains increasing popularity in both academy and industry recently. However, the redundancy and lengthiness issues of crowdsourced answers limit the performance of answer selection and lead to reading difficulties and misunderstandings for community users. To solve these problems, we tackle the tasks of answer selection and answer summary generation in CQA with a novel joint learning model. Specifically, we design a question-driven pointer-generator network, which exploits the correlation information between question-Answer pairs to aid in attending the essential information when generating answer summaries. Meanwhile, we leverage the answer summaries to alleviate noise in original lengthy answers when ranking the relevancy degrees of question-Answer pairs. In addition, we construct a new large-scale CQA corpus, WikiHowQA, which contains long answers for answer selection as well as reference summaries for answer summarization. The experimental results show that the joint learning method can effectively address the answer redundancy issue in CQA and achieves state-ofthe-art results on both answer selection and text summarization tasks. Furthermore, the proposed model is shown to be of great transferring ability and applicability for resource-poor CQA tasks, which lack of reference answer summaries.

Keywords

Community question answering, Joint learning, Question-answer pairs, Summary generation, Text summarization

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Information Security

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering; Information Systems and Management

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

Proceedings of the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, New York, USA, 2020 Feb 7-12

First Page

7651

Last Page

7658

ISBN

9781577358350

Identifier

10.1609/aaai.v34i05.6266

Publisher

AAAI Press

City or Country

Washington

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i05.6266

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