Modeling Extractive Question Answering Using Encoder-Decoder Models with Constrained Decoding and Evaluation-Based Reinforcement Learning

Extractive Question Answering, also known as machine reading comprehension, can be used to evaluate how well a computer comprehends human language. It is a valuable topic with many applications, such as in chatbots and personal assistants. End-to-end neural-network-based models have achieved remarkable performance on these tasks. The most frequently used approach to extract answers with neural networks is to predict the answer’s start and end positions in the document, independently or jointly. In this paper, we propose another approach that considers all words in an answer jointly. We introduce an encoder-decoder model to learn from all words in the answer. This differs from previous works. which usually focused on the start and end and ignored the words in the middle. To help the encoder-decoder model to perform this task better, we employ evaluation-based reinforcement learning with different reward functions. The results of an experiment on the SQuAD dataset show that the proposed method can outperform the baseline in terms of F1 scores, offering another potential approach to solve the extractive QA task.