Bilateral Multi-Perspective Matching for Natural Language Sentences

Bilateral Multi-Perspective Matching for Natural Language Sentences

Zhiguo Wang, Wael Hamza, Radu Florian

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4144-4150. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/579

Natural language sentence matching is a fundamental technology for a variety of tasks. Previous approaches either match sentences from a single direction or only apply single granular (word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence) matching. In this work, we propose a bilateral multi-perspective matching (BiMPM) model. Given two sentences P and Q, our model first encodes them with a BiLSTM encoder. Next, we match the two encoded sentences in two directions P against Q and P against Q. In each matching direction, each time step of one sentence is matched against all time-steps of the other sentence from multiple perspectives. Then, another BiLSTM layer is utilized to aggregate the matching results into a fix-length matching vector. Finally, based on the matching vector, a decision is made through a fully connected layer. We evaluate our model on three tasks: paraphrase identification, natural language inference and answer sentence selection. Experimental results on standard benchmark datasets show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on all tasks.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Information Retrieval
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Semantics
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing: Question Answering