2020/04/24 by Mandar Joshi, Kenton Lee, Joshi, Mandar +5 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2004.12006
openalex publication_date 2020/04/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present a method to represent input texts by contextualizing them jointly with dynamically retrieved textual encyclopedic background knowledge from multiple documents. We apply our method to reading comprehension tasks by encoding questions and passages together with background sentences about the entities they mention. We show that integrating background knowledge from text is effective for tasks focusing on factual reasoning and allows direct reuse of powerful pretrained BERT-style encoders. Moreover, knowledge integration can be further improved with suitable pretraining via a self-supervised masked language model objective over words in background-augmented input text. On TriviaQA, our approach obtains improvements of 1.6 to 3.1 F1 over comparable RoBERTa models which do not integrate background knowledge dynamically. On MRQA, a large collection of diverse QA datasets, we see consistent gains in-domain along with large improvements out-of-domain on BioASQ (2.1 to 4.2 F1), TextbookQA (1.6 to 2.0 F1), and DuoRC (1.1 to 2.0 F1).