Factoid Question Answering with Distant Supervision

Automatic question answering (QA), which can greatly facilitate the access to information, is an important task in artificial intelligence. Recent years have witnessed the development of QA methods based on deep learning. However, a great amount of data is needed to train deep neural networks, and it is laborious to annotate training data for factoid QA of new domains or languages. In this paper, a distantly supervised method is proposed to automatically generate QA pairs. Additional efforts are paid to let the generated questions reflect the query interests and expression styles of users by exploring the community QA. Specifically, the generated questions are selected according to the estimated probabilities they are asked. Diverse paraphrases of questions are mined from community QA data, considering that the model trained on monotonous synthetic questions is very sensitive to variants of question expressions. Experimental results show that the model solely trained on generated data via the distant supervision and mined paraphrases could answer real-world questions with the accuracy of 49.34%. When limited annotated training data is available, significant improvements could be achieved by incorporating the generated data. An improvement of 1.35 absolute points is still observed on WebQA, a dataset with large-scale annotated training samples.