Exploring Machine Reading Comprehension with Explicit Knowledge

To apply general knowledge to machine reading comprehension (MRC), we propose an innovative MRC approach, which consists of a WordNet-based data enrichment method and an MRC model named as Knowledge Aided Reader (KAR). The data enrichment method uses the semantic relations of WordNet to extract semantic level inter-word connections from each passage-question pair in the MRC dataset, and allows us to control the amount of the extraction results by setting a hyper-parameter. KAR uses the extraction results of the data enrichment method as explicit knowledge to assist the prediction of answer spans. According to the experimental results, the single model of KAR achieves an Exact Match (EM) of $72.4$ and an F1 Score of $81.1$ on the development set of SQuAD, and more importantly, by applying different settings in the data enrichment method to change the amount of the extraction results, there is a $2\%$ variation in the resulting performance of KAR, which implies that the explicit knowledge provided by the data enrichment method plays an effective role in the training of KAR.