Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) bring new opportunities to challenging problems, especially those that need high-level intelligence, such as the math word problem (MWPs). However, directly applying existing PLMs to MWPs can fail as the generation process lacks sufficient supervision and thus lacks fast adaptivity as humans. We notice that human reasoning has a dual reasoning framework that consists of an immediate reaction system (system 1) and a delicate reasoning system (system 2), where the entire reasoning is determined by their interaction. This inspires us to develop a cooperative reasoning-induced PLM for solving MWPs, called Cooperative Reasoning (CoRe), resulting in a human-like reasoning architecture with system 1 as the generator and system 2 as the verifier. In our approach, the generator is responsible for generating reasoning paths, and the verifiers are used to supervise the evaluation in order to obtain reliable feedback for the generator. We evaluate our CoRe framework on several mathematical reasoning datasets and achieve decent improvement over state-of-the-art methods, up to 9.6% increase over best baselines.

We propose a new paradigm for universal information extraction (IE) that is compatible with any schema format and applicable to a list of IE tasks, such as named entity recognition, relation extraction, event extraction and sentiment analysis. Our approach converts the text-based IE tasks as the token-pair problem, which uniformly disassembles all extraction targets into joint span detection, classification and association problems with a unified extractive framework, namely UniEX. UniEX can synchronously encode schema-based prompt and textual information, and collaboratively learn the generalized knowledge from pre-defined information using the auto-encoder language models. We develop a traffine attention mechanism to integrate heterogeneous factors including tasks, labels and inside tokens, and obtain the extraction target via a scoring matrix. Experiment results show that UniEX can outperform generative universal IE models in terms of performance and inference-speed on 14 benchmarks IE datasets with the supervised setting. The state-of-the-art performance in low-resource scenarios also verifies the transferability and effectiveness of UniEX.

Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) for machine reading comprehension (MRC) is challenging. It requires a model to select a correct answer from several candidate options related to text passages or dialogue. To select the correct answer, such models must have the ability to understand natural languages, comprehend textual representations, and infer the relationship between candidate options, questions, and passages. Previous models calculated representations between passages and question-option pairs separately, thereby ignoring the effect of other relation-pairs. In this study, we propose a human reading comprehension attention (HRCA) model and a passage-question-option (PQO) matrix-guided HRCA model called HRCA+ to increase accuracy. The HRCA model updates the information learned from the previous relation-pair to the next relation-pair. HRCA+ utilizes the textual information and the interior relationship between every two parts in a passage, a question, and the corresponding candidate options. Our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. On the Semeval-2018 Task 11 dataset, our proposed method improved accuracy levels from 95.8% to 97.2%, and on the DREAM dataset, it improved accuracy levels from 90.4% to 91.6% without extra training data, from 91.8% to 92.6% with extra training data.

Keyphrases, that concisely describe the high-level topics discussed in a document, are very useful for a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Though existing keyphrase generation methods have achieved remarkable performance on this task, they generate many overlapping phrases (including sub-phrases or super-phrases) of keyphrases. In this paper, we propose the parallel Seq2Seq network with the coverage attention to alleviate the overlapping phrase problem. Specifically, we integrate the linguistic constraints of keyphrase into the basic Seq2Seq network on the source side, and employ the multi-task learning framework on the target side. In addition, in order to prevent from generating overlapping phrases of keyphrases with correct syntax, we introduce the coverage vector to keep track of the attention history and to decide whether the parts of source text have been covered by existing generated keyphrases. Experimental results show that our method can outperform the state-of-the-art CopyRNN on scientific datasets, and is also more effective in news domain.