Effective shared representations with multitask learning for community question answering

Abstract

An important asset of using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for text applications is their ability to automatically engineer features. Unfortunately, DNNs usually require a lot of training data, especially for high-level semantic tasks such as community Question Answering (cQA). In this paper, we tackle the problem of data scarcity by learning the target DNN together with two auxiliary tasks in a multitask learning setting. We exploit the strong semantic connection between selection of comments relevant to (i) new questions and (ii) forum questions. This enables a global representation for comments, new and previous questions. The experiments of our model on a SemEval challenge dataset for cQA show a 20% relative improvement over standard DNNs.