This repository contains the data and code to reproduce the results of our paper: https://aaai.org/ojs/index.php/AAAI/article/view/4671/4549 (alternative URL: https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/aaai19-coala-cqa-answer-selection/2019_AAAI_COALA_Camready.pdf)

Please use the following citation:

@article{rueckle:AAAI:2019,
  title = {COALA: A Neural Coverage-Based Approach for Long Answer Selection with Small Data.},
  author = {R{\"u}ckl{\'e}, Andreas and Moosavi, Nafise Sadat and Gurevych, Iryna},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2019)},
  pages = {6932--6939},
  month = jan,
  year = {2019},
  location = {Honolulu, Hawaii, USA},
  doi = "10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33016932",
  url = "https://aaai.org/ojs/index.php/AAAI/article/view/4671/4549"
}

Abstract: Current neural network based community question answering (cQA) systems fall short of (1) properly handling long answers which are common in cQA; (2) performing under small data conditions, where a large amount of training data is unavailable—i.e., for some domains in English and even more so for a huge number of datasets in other languages; and (3) benefiting from syntactic information in the model—e.g., to differentiate between identical lexemes with different syntactic roles. In this paper, we propose COALA, an answer selection approach that (a) selects appropriate long answers due to an effective comparison of all question-answer aspects, (b) has the ability to generalize from a small number of training examples, and (c) makes use of the information about syntactic roles of words. We show that our approach outperforms existing answer selection models by a large margin on six cQA datasets from different domains. Furthermore, we report the best results on the passage retrieval benchmark WikiPassageQA.

Contact person: Andreas Rücklé

https://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/

https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/

This repository contains experimental software and is published for the sole purpose of giving additional background details on the respective publication.

To run an experiment:

python run_experiment configs/se_apple_coala.yaml

To run hyperparameter optimization:

python run_random_search.py configs/example_random_search.yaml

The datasets are available here: coala_data.zip

More details on the framework that we used in COALA can be found in our other repositories: iwcs2017-answer-selection, acl2017-non-factoid-qa

We used Python 2.7.14 for our experiments. The output of pip --freeze is given in pipfreeze.txt (not all of the packages are strictly required).