CHIME: Cross-passage Hierarchical Memory Network for Generative Review Question Answering

Abstract

We introduce CHIME, a cross-passage hierarchical memory network for question answering (QA) via text generation. It extends XLNet (Yang et al., 2019) introducing an auxiliary memory module consisting of two components: the context memory collecting cross-passage evidence, and the answer memory working as a buffer continually refining the generated answers. Empirically, we show the efficacy of the proposed architecture in the multi-passage generative QA, outperforming the state-of-the-art baselines with better syntactically well-formed answers and increased precision in addressing the questions of the AmazonQA review dataset. An additional qualitative analysis revealed the interpretability introduced by the memory module.