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Category-Highlighting Transformer Network for Question Retrieval

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Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13945))

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Abstract

Question retrieval aims to find the semantically equivalent questions from question archives for a user question. Recently, Transformer-based models have significantly advanced the progress of question retrieval, which mainly focus on capturing the content-based semantic relations of two questions. However, they can not well capture the category-based semantic relations of two questions, even question categories are very important to identify the semantic equivalence of two questions. To capture both the content-based and category-based semantic relations, we study the issue of improving Transformer by highlighting and incorporating the category information. To this end, we innovatively propose the Category-Highlighting Transformer Network (CHT). Because questions are not equipped with explicit categories, CHT first uses a category identification unit to construct category-based semantic representations for the question and its embedded words. Second, to “deeply” capture the category-based and content-based semantic relations, we develop the category-highlighting Transformer by improving the self-attention unit with the category-based representations. The cascaded category highlighting Transformers are used for modelling “individual” semantics of a question and “joint” semantics of two questions. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that the category-highlighting Transformer network outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions.

D. Ma and L. Chong—Equal contribution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://data.quora.com/First-Quora-Dataset-ReleaseQuestion-Pairs.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by National Key Research and Development Program (No. 2020YFB1710004) and the National Science Foundation of China under the grant 62272466.

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Correspondence to Yueguo Chen .

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Ma, D., Chong, L., Chen, Y., Shen, L. (2023). Category-Highlighting Transformer Network for Question Retrieval. In: Wang, X., et al. Database Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13945. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30675-4_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30675-4_33

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