An Abstractive approach to Question Answering

Question Answering has come a long way from answer sentence selection, relational QA to reading and comprehension. We move our attention to abstractive question answering by which we facilitate machine to read passages and answer questions by generating them. We frame the problem as a sequence to sequence learning where the encoder being a network that models the relation between question and passage, thereby relying solely on passage and question content to form an abstraction of the answer. Not being able to retain facts and making repetitions are common mistakes that affect the overall legibility of answers. To counter these issues, we employ copying mechanism and maintenance of coverage vector in our model respectively. Our results on MS-MARCO demonstrates it’s superiority over baselines and we also show qualitative examples where we improved in terms of correctness and readability.