Question: What area are they studying?
Evidence: Since humans amass more and more generally available data in the form of unstructured text it would be very useful to teach machines to read and comprehend such data and then use this understanding to answer our questions. A significant amount of research has recently focused on answering one particular kind of questions the answer to which depends on understanding a context document. These are cloze-style questions BIBREF0 which require the reader to fill in a missing word in a sentence. An important advantage of such questions is that they can be generated automatically from a suitable text corpus which allows us to produce a practically unlimited amount of them. That opens the task to notoriously data-hungry deep-learning techniques which now seem to outperform all alternative approaches.
Two such large-scale datasets have recently been proposed by researchers from Google DeepMind and Facebook AI: the CNN/Daily Mail dataset BIBREF1 and the Children's Book Test (CBT) BIBREF2 respectively. These have attracted a lot of attention from the research community BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF12 with a new state-of-the-art model coming out every few weeks.
However if our goal is a production-level system actually capable of helping humans, we want the model to use all available resources as efficiently as possible. Given that
we believe that if the community is striving to bring the performance as far as possible, it should move its work to larger data.
This thinking goes in line with recent developments in the area of language modelling. For a long time models were being compared on several "standard" datasets with publications often presenting minuscule improvements in performance. Then the large-scale One Billion Word corpus dataset appeared BIBREF15 and it allowed Jozefowicz et al. to train much larger LSTM models BIBREF16 that almost halved the state-of-the-art perplexity on this dataset.
We think it is time to make a similar step in the area of text comprehension. Hence we are introducing the BookTest, a new dataset very similar to the Children's Book test but more than 60 times larger to enable training larger models even in the domain of text comprehension. Furthermore the methodology used to create our data can later be used to create even larger datasets when the need arises thanks to further technological progress.
We show that if we evaluate a model trained on the new dataset on the now standard Children's Book Test dataset, we see an improvement in accuracy much larger than other research groups achieved by enhancing the model architecture itself (while still using the original CBT training data). By training on the new dataset, we reduce the prediction error by almost one third. On the named-entity version of CBT this brings the ensemble of our models to the level of human baseline as reported by Facebook BIBREF2 . However in the final section we show in our own human study that there is still room for improvement on the CBT beyond the performance of our model.
We think it is time to make a similar step in the area of text comprehension. Hence we are introducing the BookTest, a new dataset very similar to the Children’s Book test but more than 60 times larger1 to enable training larger models even in the domain of text comprehension. Furthermore the methodology used to create our data can later be used to create even larger datasets when the need arises thanks to further technological progress.
Answer: Text comprehension.