prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. what were the baselines?
Context 1: Introduction
Conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems typically consist of several independently learned components: an acoustic model to predict context-dependent sub-phoneme states (senones) from audio, a graph structure to map senones to phonemes, and a pronunciation model to map phonemes to words  Hybrid systems combine hidden Markov models to model state dependencies with neural networks to predict states BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF3   Newer approaches such as end-to-end (E2E) systems reduce the overall complexity of the final system 
Our research builds on prior work that has explored using time-delay neural networks (TDNN), other forms of convolutional neural networks, and Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF6   We took inspiration from wav2letter BIBREF6 , which uses 1D-convolution layers  Liptchinsky et al  BIBREF7 improved wav2letter by increasing the model depth to 19 convolutional layers and adding Gated Linear Units (GLU) BIBREF8 , weight normalization BIBREF9 and dropout 
By building a deeper and larger capacity network, we aim to demonstrate that we can match or outperform non end-to-end models on the LibriSpeech and 2000hr Fisher+Switchboard tasks  Like wav2letter, our architecture, Jasper, uses a stack of 1D-convolution layers, but with ReLU and batch normalization BIBREF10   We find that ReLU and batch normalization outperform other activation and normalization schemes that we tested for convolutional ASR  As a result, Jasper's architecture contains only 1D convolution, batch normalization, ReLU, and dropout layers – operators highly optimized for training and inference on GPUs 
It is possible to increase the capacity of the Jasper model by stacking these operations  Our largest version uses 54 convolutional layers (333M parameters), while our small model uses 34 (201M parameters)  We use residual connections to enable this level of depth  We investigate a number of residual options and propose a new residual connection topology we call Dense Residual (DR) 
Integrating our best acoustic model with a Transformer-XL BIBREF11 language model allows us to obtain new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on LibriSpeech BIBREF12 test-clean of 2 95% WER and SOTA results among end-to-end models on LibriSpeech test-other  We show competitive results on Wall Street Journal (WSJ), and 2000hr Fisher+Switchboard (F+S)  Using only greedy decoding without a language model we achieve 3 86% WER on LibriSpeech test-clean 
This paper makes the following contributions:
Jasper Architecture
Jasper is a family of end-to-end ASR models that replace acoustic and pronunciation models with a convolutional neural network  Jasper uses mel-filterbank features calculated from 20ms windows with a 10ms overlap, and outputs a probability distribution over characters per frame  Jasper has a block architecture: a Jasper INLINEFORM0 x INLINEFORM1 model has INLINEFORM2 blocks, each with INLINEFORM3 sub-blocks  Each sub-block applies the following operations: a 1D-convolution, batch norm, ReLU, and dropout  All sub-blocks in a block have the same number of output channels 
Each block input is connected directly into the last sub-block via a residual connection  The residual connection is first projected through a 1x1 convolution to account for different numbers of input and output channels, then through a batch norm layer  The output of this batch norm layer is added to the output of the batch norm layer in the last sub-block  The result of this sum is passed through the activation function and dropout to produce the output of the sub-block 
The sub-block architecture of Jasper was designed to facilitate fast GPU inference  Each sub-block can be fused into a single GPU kernel: dropout is not used at inference-time and is eliminated, batch norm can be fused with the preceding convolution, ReLU clamps the result, and residual summation can be treated as a modified bias term in this fused operation 
All Jasper models have four additional convolutional blocks: one pre-processing and three post-processing  See Figure FIGREF7 and Table TABREF8 for details 
We also build a variant of Jasper, Jasper Dense Residual (DR)  Jasper DR follows DenseNet BIBREF15 and DenseRNet BIBREF16 , but instead of having dense connections within a block, the output of a convolution block is added to the inputs of all the following blocks  While DenseNet and DenseRNet concatenates the outputs of different layers, Jasper DR adds them in the same way that residuals are added in ResNet  As explained below, we find addition to be as effective as concatenation 
Normalization and Activation
In our study, we evaluate performance of models with:
3 types of normalization: batch norm BIBREF10 , weight norm BIBREF9 , and layer norm BIBREF17
3 types of rectified linear units: ReLU, clipped ReLU (cReLU), and leaky ReLU (lReLU)
2 types of gated units: gated linear units (GLU) BIBREF8 , and gated activation units (GAU) BIBREF18
All experiment results are shown in Table TABREF15   We first experimented with a smaller Jasper5x3 model to pick the top 3 settings before training on larger Jasper models  We found that layer norm with GAU performed the best on the smaller model  Layer norm with ReLU and batch norm with ReLU came second and third in our tests  Using these 3, we conducted further experiments on a larger Jasper10x4  For larger models, we noticed that batch norm with ReLU outperformed other choices  Thus, leading us to decide on batch normalization and ReLU for our architecture 
During batching, all sequences are padded to match the longest sequence  These padded values caused issues when using layer norm  We applied a sequence mask to exclude padding values from the mean and variance calculation  Further, we computed mean and variance over both the time dimension and channels similar to the sequence-wise normalization proposed by Laurent et al  BIBREF19   In addition to masking layer norm, we additionally applied masking prior to the convolution operation, and masking the mean and variance calculation in batch norm  These results are shown in Table TABREF16   Interestingly, we found that while masking before convolution gives a lower WER, using masks for both convolutions and batch norm results in worse performance 
As a final note, we found that training with weight norm was very unstable leading to exploding activations 
Residual Connections
For models deeper than Jasper 5x3, we observe consistently that residual connections are necessary for training to converge  In addition to the simple residual and dense residual model described above, we investigated DenseNet BIBREF15 and DenseRNet BIBREF16 variants of Jasper  Both connect the outputs of each sub-block to the inputs of following sub-blocks within a block  DenseRNet, similar to Dense Residual, connects the output of each output of each block to the input of all following blocks  DenseNet and DenseRNet combine residual connections using concatenation whereas Residual and Dense Residual use addition  We found that Dense Residual and DenseRNet perform similarly with each performing better on specific subsets of LibriSpeech  We decided to use Dense Residual for subsequent experiments  The main reason is that due to concatenation, the growth factor for DenseNet and DenseRNet requires tuning for deeper models whereas Dense Residual simply just repeats a sub-blocks 
Language Model
A language model (LM) is a probability distribution over arbitrary symbol sequences INLINEFORM0 such that more likely sequences are assigned high probabilities  LMs are frequently used to condition beam search  During decoding, candidates are evaluated using both acoustic scores and LM scores  Traditional N-gram LMs have been augmented with neural LMs in recent work BIBREF20 , BIBREF21 , BIBREF22  
We experiment with statistical N-gram language models BIBREF23 and neural Transformer-XL BIBREF11 models  Our best results use acoustic and word-level N-gram language models to generate a candidate list using beam search with a width of 2048  Next, an external Transformer-XL LM rescores the final list  All LMs were trained on datasets independently from acoustic models  We show results with the neural LM in our Results section  We observed a strong correlation between the quality of the neural LM (measured by perplexity) and WER as shown in Figure FIGREF20  
NovoGrad
For training, we use either Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with momentum or our own NovoGrad, an optimizer similar to Adam BIBREF14 , except that its second moments are computed per layer instead of per weight  Compared to Adam, it reduces memory consumption and we find it to be more numerically stable 
At each step INLINEFORM0 , NovoGrad computes the stochastic gradient INLINEFORM1 following the regular forward-backward pass  Then the second-order moment INLINEFORM2 is computed for each layer INLINEFORM3 similar to ND-Adam BIBREF27 : DISPLAYFORM0
The second-order moment INLINEFORM0 is used to re-scale gradients INLINEFORM1 before calculating the first-order moment INLINEFORM2 : DISPLAYFORM0
If L2-regularization is used, a weight decay INLINEFORM0 is added to the re-scaled gradient (as in AdamW BIBREF28 ): DISPLAYFORM0
Finally, new weights are computed using the learning rate INLINEFORM0 : DISPLAYFORM0
Using NovoGrad instead of SGD with momentum, we decreased the WER on dev-clean LibriSpeech from 4 00% to 3 64%, a relative improvement of 9% for Jasper DR 10x5  We will further analyze NovoGrad in forthcoming work 
Results
We evaluate Jasper across a number of datasets in various domains  In all experiments, we use dropout and weight decay as regularization  At training time, we use speed perturbation with fixed +/-10% BIBREF29 for LibriSpeech  For WSJ and Hub5'00, we use a random speed perturbation factor between [-10%, 10%] as each utterance is fed into the model  All models have been trained on NVIDIA DGX-1 in mixed precision BIBREF30 using OpenSeq2Seq BIBREF31   Source code, training configurations, and pretrained models are available 
Read Speech
We evaluated the performance of Jasper on two read speech datasets: LibriSpeech and Wall Street Journal (WSJ)  For LibriSpeech, we trained Jasper DR 10x5 using our NovoGrad optimizer for 400 epochs  We achieve SOTA performance on the test-clean subset and SOTA among end-to-end speech recognition models on test-other 
We trained a smaller Jasper 10x3 model with SGD with momentum optimizer for 400 epochs on a combined WSJ dataset (80 hours): LDC93S6A (WSJ0) and LDC94S13A (WSJ1)  The results are provided in Table TABREF29  
Conversational Speech
We also evaluate the Jasper model's performance on a conversational English corpus  The Hub5 Year 2000 (Hub5'00) evaluation (LDC2002S09, LDC2005S13) is widely used in academia  It is divided into two subsets: Switchboard (SWB) and Callhome (CHM)  The training data for both the acoustic and language models consisted of the 2000hr Fisher+Switchboard training data (LDC2004S13, LDC2005S13, LDC97S62)  Jasper DR 10x5 was trained using SGD with momentum for 50 epochs  We compare to other models trained using the same data and report Hub5'00 results in Table TABREF31  
We obtain good results for SWB  However, there is work to be done to improve WER on harder tasks such as CHM 
Conclusions
We have presented a new family of neural architectures for end-to-end speech recognition  Inspired by wav2letter's convolutional approach, we build a deep and scalable model, which requires a well-designed residual topology, effective regularization, and a strong optimizer  As our architecture studies demonstrated, a combination of standard components leads to SOTA results on LibriSpeech and competitive results on other benchmarks  Our Jasper architecture is highly efficient for training and inference, and serves as a good baseline approach on top of which to explore more sophisticated regularization, data augmentation, loss functions, language models, and optimization strategies  We are interested to see if our approach can continue to scale to deeper models and larger datasets 
Context 2: Introduction
There is a recent spark of interest in the task of Question Answering (QA) over unstructured textual data, also referred to as Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC)  This is mostly due to wide-spread success of advances in various facets of deep learning related research, such as novel architectures BIBREF0, BIBREF1 that allow for efficient optimisation of neural networks consisting of multiple layers, hardware designed for deep learning purposes and software frameworks BIBREF2, BIBREF3 that allow efficient development and testing of novel approaches  These factors enable researchers to produce models that are pre-trained on large scale corpora and provide contextualised word representations BIBREF4 that are shown to be a vital component towards solutions for a variety of natural language understanding tasks, including MRC BIBREF5  Another important factor that led to the recent success in MRC-related tasks is the widespread availability of various large datasets, e g , SQuAD BIBREF6, that provide sufficient examples for optimising statistical models  The combination of these factors yields notable results, even surpassing human performance BIBREF7 
MRC is a generic task format that can be used to probe for various natural language understanding capabilities BIBREF8  Therefore it is crucially important to establish a rigorous evaluation methodology in order to be able to draw reliable conclusions from conducted experiments  While increasing effort is put into the evaluation of novel architectures, such as keeping the evaluation data from public access to prevent unintentional overfitting to test data, performing ablation and error studies and introducing novel metrics BIBREF9, surprisingly little is done to establish the quality of the data itself  Additionally, recent research arrived at worrisome findings: the data of those gold standards, which is usually gathered involving a crowd-sourcing step, suffers from flaws in design BIBREF10 or contains overly specific keywords BIBREF11  Furthermore, these gold standards contain “annotation artefacts”, cues that lead models into focusing on superficial aspects of text, such as lexical overlap and word order, instead of actual language understanding BIBREF12, BIBREF13  These weaknesses cast some doubt on whether the data can reliably evaluate the reading comprehension performance of the models they evaluate, i e  if the models are indeed being assessed for their capability to read 
Figure FIGREF3 shows an example from HotpotQA BIBREF14, a dataset that exhibits the last kind of weakness mentioned above, i e , the presence of unique keywords in both the question and the passage (in close proximity to the expected answer) 
An evaluation methodology is vital to the fine-grained understanding of challenges associated with a single gold standard, in order to understand in greater detail which capabilities of MRC models it evaluates  More importantly, it allows to draw comparisons between multiple gold standards and between the results of respective state-of-the-art models that are evaluated on them 
In this work, we take a step back and propose a framework to systematically analyse MRC evaluation data, typically a set of questions and expected answers to be derived from accompanying passages  Concretely, we introduce a methodology to categorise the linguistic complexity of the textual data and the reasoning and potential external knowledge required to obtain the expected answer  Additionally we propose to take a closer look at the factual correctness of the expected answers, a quality dimension that appears under-explored in literature 
We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed framework by applying it to precisely describe and compare six contemporary MRC datasets  Our findings reveal concerns about their factual correctness, the presence of lexical cues that simplify the task of reading comprehension and the lack of semantic altering grammatical modifiers  We release the raw data comprised of 300 paragraphs, questions and answers richly annotated under the proposed framework as a resource for researchers developing natural language understanding models and datasets to utilise further 
To the best of our knowledge this is the first attempt to introduce a common evaluation methodology for MRC gold standards and the first across-the-board qualitative evaluation of MRC datasets with respect to the proposed categories 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Problem definition
We define the task of machine reading comprehension, the target application of the proposed methodology as follows: Given a paragraph $P$ that consists of tokens (words) $p_1, \ldots , p_{n_P}$ and a question $Q$ that consists of tokens $q_1 \ldots q_{n_Q}$, the goal is to retrieve an answer $A$ with tokens $a_1 \ldots a_{n_A}$  $A$ is commonly constrained to be one of the following cases BIBREF15, illustrated in Figure FIGREF9:
Multiple choice, where the goal is to predict $A$ from a given set of choices $\mathcal {A}$ 
Cloze-style, where $S$ is a sentence, and $A$ and $Q$ are obtained by removing a sequence of words such that $Q = S - A$  The task is to fill in the resulting gap in $Q$ with the expected answer $A$ to form $S$ 
Span, where is a continuous subsequence of tokens from the paragraph ($A \subseteq P$)  Flavours include multiple spans as the correct answer or $A \subseteq Q$ 
Free form, where $A$ is an unconstrained natural language string 
A gold standard $G$ is composed of $m$ entries $(Q_i, A_i, P_i)_{i\in \lbrace 1,\ldots , m\rbrace }$ 
The performance of an approach is established by comparing its answer predictions $A^*_{i}$ on the given input $(Q_i, T_i)$ (and $\mathcal {A}_i$ for the multiple choice setting) against the expected answer $A_i$ for all $i\in \lbrace 1,\ldots , m\rbrace $ under a performance metric  Typical performance metrics are exact match (EM) or accuracy, i e  the percentage of exactly predicted answers, and the F1 score – the harmonic mean between the precision and the recall of the predicted tokens compared to expected answer tokens  The overall F1 score can either be computed by averaging the F1 scores for every instance or by first averaging the precision and recall and then computing the F1 score from those averages (macro F1)  Free-text answers, meanwhile, are evaluated by means of text generation and summarisation metrics such as BLEU BIBREF16 or ROUGE-L BIBREF17 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest
In this section we describe a methodology to categorise gold standards according to linguistic complexity, required reasoning and background knowledge, and their factual correctness  Specifically, we use those dimensions as high-level categories of a qualitative annotation schema for annotating question, expected answer and the corresponding context  We further enrich the qualitative annotations by a metric based on lexical cues in order to approximate a lower bound for the complexity of the reading comprehension task  By sampling entries from each gold standard and annotating them, we obtain measurable results and thus are able to make observations about the challenges present in that gold standard data 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest ::: Problem setting
We are interested in different types of the expected answer  We differentiate between Span, where an answer is a continuous span taken from the passage, Paraphrasing, where the answer is a paraphrase of a text span, Unanswerable, where there is no answer present in the context, and Generated, if it does not fall into any of the other categories  It is not sufficient for an answer to restate the question or combine multiple Span or Paraphrasing answers to be annotated as Generated  It is worth mentioning that we focus our investigations on answerable questions  For a complementary qualitative analysis that categorises unanswerable questions, the reader is referred to Yatskar2019 
Furthermore, we mark a sentence as Supporting Fact if it contains evidence required to produce the expected answer, as they are used further in the complexity analysis 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest ::: Factual Correctness
An important factor for the quality of a benchmark is its factual correctness, because on the one hand, the presence of factually wrong or debatable examples introduces an upper bound for the achievable performance of models on those gold standards  On the other hand, it is hard to draw conclusions about the correctness of answers produced by a model that is evaluated on partially incorrect data 
One way by which developers of modern crowd-sourced gold standards ensure quality is by having the same entry annotated by multiple workers BIBREF18 and keeping only those with high agreement  We investigate whether this method is enough to establish a sound ground truth answer that is unambiguously correct  Concretely we annotate an answer as Debatable when the passage features multiple plausible answers, when multiple expected answers contradict each other, or an answer is not specific enough with respect to the question and a more specific answer is present  We annotate an answer as Wrong when it is factually wrong and a correct answer is present in the context 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest ::: Required Reasoning
It is important to understand what types of reasoning the benchmark evaluates, in order to be able to accredit various reasoning capabilities to the models it evaluates  Our proposed reasoning categories are inspired by those found in scientific question answering literature BIBREF19, BIBREF20, as research in this area focuses on understanding the required reasoning capabilities  We include reasoning about the Temporal succession of events, Spatial reasoning about directions and environment, and Causal reasoning about the cause-effect relationship between events  We further annotate (multiple-choice) answers that can only be answered By Exclusion of every other alternative 
We further extend the reasoning categories by operational logic, similar to those required in semantic parsing tasks BIBREF21, as solving those tasks typically requires “multi-hop” reasoning BIBREF14, BIBREF22  When an answer can only be obtained by combining information from different sentences joined by mentioning a common entity, concept, date, fact or event (from here on called entity), we annotate it as Bridge  We further annotate the cases, when the answer is a concrete entity that satisfies a Constraint specified in the question, when it is required to draw a Comparison of multiple entities' properties or when the expected answer is an Intersection of their properties (e g  “What do Person A and Person B have in common?”)
We are interested in the linguistic reasoning capabilities probed by a gold standard, therefore we include the appropriate category used by Wang2019  Specifically, we annotate occurrences that require understanding of Negation, Quantifiers (such as “every”, “some”, or “all”), Conditional (“if    then”) statements and the logical implications of Con-/Disjunction (i e  “and” and “or”) in order to derive the expected answer 
Finally, we investigate whether arithmetic reasoning requirements emerge in MRC gold standards as this can probe for reasoning that is not evaluated by simple answer retrieval BIBREF23  To this end, we annotate the presence of of Addition and Subtraction, answers that require Ordering of numerical values, Counting and Other occurrences of simple mathematical operations 
An example can exhibit multiple forms of reasoning  Notably, we do not annotate any of the categories mentioned above if the expected answer is directly stated in the passage  For example, if the question asks “How many total points were scored in the game?” and the passage contains a sentence similar to “The total score of the game was 51 points”, it does not require any reasoning, in which case we annotate it as Retrieval 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest ::: Knowledge
Worthwhile knowing is whether the information presented in the context is sufficient to answer the question, as there is an increase of benchmarks deliberately designed to probe a model's reliance on some sort of background knowledge BIBREF24  We seek to categorise the type of knowledge required  Similar to Wang2019, on the one hand we annotate the reliance on factual knowledge, that is (Geo)political/Legal, Cultural/Historic, Technical/Scientific and Other Domain Specific knowledge about the world that can be expressed as a set of facts  On the other hand, we denote Intuitive knowledge requirements, which is challenging to express as a set of facts, such as the knowledge that a parenthetic numerical expression next to a person's name in a biography usually denotes his life span 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest ::: Linguistic Complexity
Another dimension of interest is the evaluation of various linguistic capabilities of MRC models BIBREF25, BIBREF26, BIBREF27  We aim to establish which linguistic phenomena are probed by gold standards and to which degree  To that end, we draw inspiration from the annotation schema used by Wang2019, and adapt it around lexical semantics and syntax 
More specifically, we annotate features that introduce variance between the supporting facts and the question  With regard to lexical semantics, we focus on the use of redundant words that do not alter the meaning of a sentence for the task of retrieving the expected answer (Redundancy), requirements on the understanding of words' semantic fields (Lexical Entailment) and the use of Synonyms and Paraphrases with respect to the question wording  Furthermore we annotate cases where supporting facts contain Abbreviations of concepts introduced in the question (and vice versa) and when a Dative case substitutes the use of a preposition (e g  “I bought her a gift” vs “I bought a gift for her”)  Regarding syntax, we annotate changes from passive to active Voice, the substitution of a Genitive case with a preposition (e g  “of”) and changes from nominal to verbal style and vice versa (Nominalisation) 
We recognise features that add ambiguity to the supporting facts, for example when information is only expressed implicitly by using an Ellipsis  As opposed to redundant words, we annotate Restrictivity and Factivity modifiers, words and phrases whose presence does change the meaning of a sentence with regard to the expected answer, and occurrences of intra- or inter-sentence Coreference in supporting facts (that is relevant to the question)  Lastly, we mark ambiguous syntactic features, when their resolution is required in order to obtain the answer  Concretely, we mark argument collection with con- and disjunctions (Listing) and ambiguous Prepositions, Coordination Scope and Relative clauses/Adverbial phrases/Appositions 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest ::: Complexity
Finally, we want to approximate the presence of lexical cues that might simplify the reading required in order to arrive at the answer  Quantifying this allows for more reliable statements about and comparison of the complexity of gold standards, particularly regarding the evaluation of comprehension that goes beyond simple lexical matching  We propose the use of coarse metrics based on lexical overlap between question and context sentences  Intuitively, we aim to quantify how much supporting facts “stand out” from their surrounding passage context  This can be used as proxy for the capability to retrieve the answer BIBREF10  Specifically, we measure (i) the number of words jointly occurring in a question and a sentence, (ii) the length of the longest n-gram shared by question and sentence and (iii) whether a word or n-gram from the question uniquely appears in a sentence 
The resulting taxonomy of the framework is shown in Figure FIGREF10  The full catalogue of features, their description, detailed annotation guideline as well as illustrating examples can be found in Appendix  
Application of the Framework ::: Candidate Datasets
We select contemporary MRC benchmarks to represent all four commonly used problem definitions BIBREF15  In selecting relevant datasets, we do not consider those that are considered “solved”, i e  where the state of the art performance surpasses human performance, as is the case with SQuAD BIBREF28, BIBREF7  Concretely, we selected gold standards that fit our problem definition and were published in the years 2016 to 2019, have at least $(2019 - publication\ year) \times 20$ citations, and bucket them according to the answer selection styles as described in Section SECREF4 We randomly draw one from each bucket and add two randomly drawn datasets from the candidate pool  This leaves us with the datasets described in Table TABREF19  For a more detailed description, we refer to Appendix  
Application of the Framework ::: Annotation Task
We randomly select 50 distinct question, answer and passage triples from the publicly available development sets of the described datasets  Training, development and the (hidden) test set are drawn from the same distribution defined by the data collection method of the respective dataset  For those collections that contain multiple questions over a single passage, we ensure that we are sampling unique paragraphs in order to increase the variety of investigated texts 
The samples were annotated by the first author of this paper, using the proposed schema  In order to validate our findings, we further take 20% of the annotated samples and present them to a second annotator (second author)  Since at its core, the annotation is a multi-label task, we report the inter-annotator agreement by computing the (micro-averaged) F1 score, where we treat the first annotator's labels as gold  Table TABREF21 reports the agreement scores, the overall (micro) average F1 score of the annotations is 0 82, which means that on average, more than two thirds of the overall annotated labels were agreed on by both annotators  We deem this satisfactory, given the complexity of the annotation schema 
Application of the Framework ::: Qualitative Analysis
We present a concise view of the annotation results in Figure FIGREF23  The full annotation results can be found in Appendix   We centre our discussion around the following main points:
Application of the Framework ::: Qualitative Analysis ::: Linguistic Features
As observed in Figure FIGREF23 the gold standards feature a high degree of Redundancy, peaking at 76% of the annotated HotpotQA samples and synonyms and paraphrases (labelled Synonym), with ReCoRd samples containing 58% of them, likely to be attributed to the elaborating type of discourse of the dataset sources (encyclopedia and newswire)  This is, however, not surprising, as it is fairly well understood in the literature that current state-of-the-art models perform well on distinguishing relevant words and phrases from redundant ones BIBREF32  Additionally, the representational capability of synonym relationships of word embeddings has been investigated and is well known BIBREF33  Finally, we observe the presence of syntactic features, such as ambiguous relative clauses, appositions and adverbial phrases, (RelAdvApp 40% in HotpotQA and ReCoRd) and those introducing variance, concretely switching between verbal and nominal styles (e g  Nominalisation 10% in HotpotQA) and from passive to active voice (Voice, 8% in HotpotQA) 
Syntactic features contributing to variety and ambiguity that we did not observe in our samples are the exploitation of verb symmetry, the use of dative and genitive cases or ambiguous prepositions and coordination scope (respectively Symmetry, Dative, Genitive, Prepositions, Scope)  Therefore we cannot establish whether models are capable of dealing with those features by evaluating them on those gold standards 
Application of the Framework ::: Qualitative Analysis ::: Factual Correctness
We identify three common sources that surface in different problems regarding an answer's factual correctness, as reported in Figure FIGREF23 and illustrate their instantiations in Table TABREF31:
Design Constraints: Choosing the task design and the data collection method introduces some constraints that lead to factually debatable examples  For example, a span might have been arbitrarily selected from multiple spans that potentially answer a question, but only a single continuous answer span per question is allowed by design, as observed in the NewsQA and MsMarco samples (32% and 34% examples annotated as Debatable with 16% and 53% thereof exhibiting arbitrary selection, respectively)  Sometimes, when additional passages are added after the annotation step, they can by chance contain passages that answer the question more precisely than the original span, as seen in HotpotQA (16% Debatable samples, 25% of them due to arbitrary selection)  In the case of MultiRC it appears to be inconsistent, whether multiple correct answer choices are expected to be correct in isolation or in conjunction (28% Debatable with 29% of them exhibiting this problem)  This might provide an explanation to its relatively weak human baseline performance of 84% F1 score BIBREF31 
Weak Quality assurance: When the (typically crowd-sourced) annotations are not appropriately validated, incorrect examples will find their way into the gold standards  This typically results in factually wrong expected answers (i e  when a more correct answer is present in the context) or a question is expected to be Unanswerable, but is actually answerable from the provided context  The latter is observed in MsMarco (83% of examples annotated as Wrong) and NewsQA, where 60% of the examples annotated as Wrong are Unanswerable with an answer present 
Arbitrary Precision: There appears to be no clear guideline on how precise the answer is expected to be, when the passage expresses the answer in varying granularities  We annotated instances as Debatable when the expected answer was not the most precise given the context (44% and 29% of Debatable instances in NewsQA and MultiRC, respectively) 
Application of the Framework ::: Qualitative Analysis ::: Semantics-altering grammatical modifiers
We took interest in whether any of the benchmarks contain what we call distracting lexical features (or distractors): grammatical modifiers that alter the semantics of a sentence for the final task of answering the given question while preserving a similar lexical form  An example of such features are cues for (double) Negation (e g , “no”, “not”), which when introduced in a sentence, reverse its meaning  Other examples include modifiers denoting Restrictivity, Factivity and Reasoning (such as Monotonicity and Conditional cues)  Examples of question-answer pairs containing a distractor are shown in Table FIGREF37 
We posit that the presence of such distractors would allow for evaluating reading comprehension beyond potential simple word matching  However, we observe no presence of such features in the benchmarks (beyond Negation in DROP, ReCoRd and HotpotQA, with 4%, 4% and 2% respectively)  This results in gold standards that clearly express the evidence required to obtain the answer, lacking more challenging, i e , distracting, sentences that can assess whether a model can truly understand meaning 
Application of the Framework ::: Qualitative Analysis ::: Other
In the Figure FIGREF23 we observe that Operational and Arithmetic reasoning moderately (6% to 8% combined) appears “in the wild”, i e  when not enforced by the data design as is the case with HotpotQA (80% Operations combined) or DROP (68% Arithmetic combined)  Causal reasoning is (exclusively) present in MultiRC (32%), whereas Temporal and Spatial reasoning requirements seem to not naturally emerge in gold standards  In ReCoRd, a fraction of 38% questions can only be answered By Exclusion of every other candidate, due to the design choice of allowing questions where the required information to answer them is not fully expressed in the accompanying paragraph 
Therefore, it is also a little surprising to observe that ReCoRd requires external resources with regard to knowledge, as seen in Figure FIGREF23  MultiRC requires technical or more precisely basic scientific knowledge (6% Technical/Scientific), as a portion of paragraphs is extracted from elementary school science textbooks BIBREF31  Other benchmarks moderately probe for factual knowledge (0% to 4% across all categories), while Intuitive knowledge is required to derive answers in each gold standard 
It is also worth pointing out, as done in Figure FIGREF23, that although MultiRC and MsMarco are not modelled as a span selection problem, their samples still contain 50% and 66% of answers that are directly taken from the context  DROP contains the biggest fraction of generated answers (60%), due to the requirement of arithmetic operations 
To conclude our analysis, we observe similar distributions of linguistic features and reasoning patterns, except where there are constraints enforced by dataset design, annotation guidelines or source text choice  Furthermore, careful consideration of design choices (such as single-span answers) is required, to avoid impairing the factual correctness of datasets, as pure crowd-worker agreement seems not sufficient in multiple cases 
Application of the Framework ::: Quantitative Results ::: Lexical overlap
We used the scores assigned by our proposed set of metrics (discussed in Section SECREF11 Dimensions of Interest: Complexity) to predict the supporting facts in the gold standard samples (that we included in our manual annotation)  Concretely, we used the following five features capturing lexical overlap: (i) the number of words occurring in sentence and question, (ii) the length of the longest n-gram shared by sentence and question, whether a (iii) uni- and (iv) bigram from the question is unique to a sentence, and (v) the sentence index, as input to a logistic regression classifier  We optimised on each sample leaving one example for evaluation  We compute the average Precision, Recall and F1 score by means of leave-one-out validation with every sample entry  The averaged results after 5 runs are reported in Table TABREF41 
We observe that even by using only our five features based lexical overlap, the simple logistic regression baseline is able to separate out the supporting facts from the context to a varying degree  This is in line with the lack of semantics-altering grammatical modifiers discussed in the qualitative analysis section above  The classifier performs best on DROP (66% F1) and MultiRC (40% F1), which means that lexical cues can considerably facilitate the search for the answer in those gold standards  On MultiRC, yadav2019quick come to a similar conclusion, by using a more sophisticated approach based on overlap between question, sentence and answer choices 
Surprisingly, the classifier is able to pick up a signal from supporting facts even on data that has been pruned against lexical overlap heuristics by populating the context with additional documents that have high overlap scores with the question  This results in significantly higher scores than when guessing randomly (HotpotQA 26% F1, and MsMarco 11% F1)  We observe similar results in the case the length of the question leaves few candidates to compute overlap with $6 3$ and $7 3$ tokens on average for MsMarco and NewsQA (26% F1), compared to $16 9$ tokens on average for the remaining four dataset samples 
Finally, it is worth mentioning that although the queries in ReCoRd are explicitly independent from the passage, the linear classifier is still capable of achieving 34% F1 score in predicting the supporting facts 
However, neural networks perform significantly better than our admittedly crude baseline (e g  66% F1 for supporting facts classification on HotpotQA BIBREF14), albeit utilising more training examples, and a richer sentence representation  This facts implies that those neural models are capable of solving more challenging problems than simple “text matching” as performed by the logistic regression baseline  However, they still circumvent actual reading comprehension as the respective gold standards are of limited suitability to evaluate this BIBREF34, BIBREF35  This suggests an exciting future research direction, that is categorising the scale between text matching and reading comprehension more precisely and respectively positioning state-of-the-art models thereon 
Related Work
Although not as prominent as the research on novel architecture, there has been steady progress in critically investigating the data and evaluation aspects of NLP and machine learning in general and MRC in particular 
Related Work ::: Adversarial Evaluation
The authors of the AddSent algorithm BIBREF11 show that MRC models trained and evaluated on the SQuAD dataset pay too little attention to details that might change the semantics of a sentence, and propose a crowd-sourcing based method to generate adversary examples to exploit that weakness  This method was further adapted to be fully automated BIBREF36 and applied to different gold standards BIBREF35  Our proposed approach differs in that we aim to provide qualitative justifications for those quantitatively measured issues 
Related Work ::: Sanity Baselines
Another line of research establishes sane baselines to provide more meaningful context to the raw performance scores of evaluated models  When removing integral parts of the task formulation such as question, the textual passage or parts thereof BIBREF37 or restricting model complexity by design in order to suppress some required form of reasoning BIBREF38, models are still able to perform comparably to the state-of-the-art  This raises concerns about the perceived benchmark complexity and is related to our work in a broader sense as one of our goals is to estimate the complexity of benchmarks 
Related Work ::: Benchmark evaluation in NLP
Beyond MRC, efforts similar to ours that pursue the goal of analysing the evaluation of established datasets exist in Natural Language Inference BIBREF13, BIBREF12  Their analyses reveal the existence of biases in training and evaluation data that can be approximated with simple majority-based heuristics  Because of these biases, trained models fail to extract the semantics that are required for the correct inference  Furthermore, a fair share of work was done to reveal gender bias in coreference resolution datasets and models BIBREF39, BIBREF40, BIBREF41 
Related Work ::: Annotation Taxonomies
Finally, related to our framework are works that introduce annotation categories for gold standards evaluation  Concretely, we build our annotation framework around linguistic features that were introduced in the GLUE suite BIBREF42 and the reasoning categories introduced in the WorldTree dataset BIBREF19  A qualitative analysis complementary to ours, with focus on the unanswerability patterns in datasets that feature unanswerable questions was done by Yatskar2019 
Conclusion
In this paper, we introduce a novel framework to characterise machine reading comprehension gold standards  This framework has potential applications when comparing different gold standards, considering the design choices for a new gold standard and performing qualitative error analyses for a proposed approach 
Furthermore we applied the framework to analyse popular state-of-the-art gold standards for machine reading comprehension: We reveal issues with their factual correctness, show the presence of lexical cues and we observe that semantics-altering grammatical modifiers are missing in all of the investigated gold standards  Studying how to introduce those modifiers into gold standards and observing whether state-of-the-art MRC models are capable of performing reading comprehension on text containing them, is a future research goal 
A future line of research is to extend the framework to be able to identify the different types of exploitable cues such as question or entity typing and concrete overlap patterns  This will allow the framework to serve as an interpretable estimate of reading comprehension complexity of gold standards  Finally, investigating gold standards under this framework where MRC models outperform the human baseline (e g  SQuAD) will contribute to a deeper understanding of the seemingly superb performance of deep learning approaches on them 
Context 3: Introduction
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is a novel Transformer BIBREF0 model, which recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in several language understanding tasks, such as question answering, natural language inference, semantic similarity, sentiment analysis, and others BIBREF1  While well-suited to dealing with relatively short sequences, Transformers suffer from a major issue that hinders their applicability in classification of long sequences, i e  they are able to consume only a limited context of symbols as their input BIBREF2 
There are several natural language (NLP) processing tasks that involve such long sequences  Of particular interest are topic identification of spoken conversations BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5 and call center customer satisfaction prediction BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9  Call center conversations, while usually quite short and to the point, often involve agents trying to solve very complex issues that the customers experience, resulting in some calls taking even an hour or more  For speech analytics purposes, these calls are typically transcribed using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, and processed in textual representations further down the NLP pipeline  These transcripts sometimes exceed the length of 5000 words  Furthermore, temporal information might play an important role in tasks like CSAT  For example, a customer may be angry at the beginning of the call, but after her issue is resolved, she would be very satisfied with the way it was handled  Therefore, simple bag of words models, or any model that does not include temporal dependencies between the inputs, may not be well-suited to handle this category of tasks  This motivates us to employ model such as BERT in this task 
In this paper, we propose a method that builds upon BERT's architecture  We split the input text sequence into shorter segments in order to obtain a representation for each of them using BERT  Then, we use either a recurrent LSTM BIBREF10 network, or another Transformer, to perform the actual classification  We call these techniques Recurrence over BERT (RoBERT) and Transformer over BERT (ToBERT)  Given that these models introduce a hierarchy of representations (segment-wise and document-wise), we refer to them as Hierarchical Transformers  To the best of our knowledge, no attempt has been done before to use the Transformer architecture for classification of such long sequences 
Our novel contributions are:
Two extensions - RoBERT and ToBERT - to the BERT model, which enable its application in classification of long texts by performing segmentation and using another layer on top of the segment representations 
State-of-the-art results on the Fisher topic classification task 
Significant improvement on the CSAT prediction task over the MS-CNN model 
Related work
Several dimensionality reduction algorithms such as RBM, autoencoders, subspace multinomial models (SMM) are used to obtain a low dimensional representation of documents from a simple BOW representation and then classify it using a simple linear classifiers BIBREF11, BIBREF12, BIBREF13, BIBREF4  In BIBREF14 hierarchical attention networks are used for document classification  They evaluate their model on several datasets with average number of words around 150  Character-level CNN are explored in BIBREF15 but it is prohibitive for very long documents  In BIBREF16, dataset collected from arXiv papers is used for classification  For classification, they sample random blocks of words and use them together for classification instead of using full document which may work well as arXiv papers are usually coherent and well written on a well defined topic  Their method may not work well on spoken conversations as random block of words usually do not represent topic of full conversation 
Several researchers addressed the problem of predicting customer satisfaction BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9  In most of these works, logistic regression, SVM, CNN are applied on different kinds of representations 
In BIBREF17, authors use BERT for document classification but the average document length is less than BERT maximum length 512  TransformerXL BIBREF2 is an extension to the Transformer architecture that allows it to better deal with long inputs for the language modelling task  It relies on the auto-regressive property of the model, which is not the case in our tasks 
Method ::: BERT
Because our work builds heavily upon BERT, we provide a brief summary of its features  BERT is built upon the Transformer architecture BIBREF0, which uses self-attention, feed-forward layers, residual connections and layer normalization as the main building blocks  It has two pre-training objectives:
Masked language modelling - some of the words in a sentence are being masked and the model has to predict them based on the context (note the difference from the typical autoregressive language model training objective);
Next sentence prediction - given two input sequences, decide whether the second one is the next sentence or not 
BERT has been shown to beat the state-of-the-art performance on 11 tasks with no modifications to the model architecture, besides adding a task-specific output layer BIBREF1  We follow same procedure suggested in BIBREF1 for our tasks  Fig  FIGREF8 shows the BERT model for classification  We obtain two kinds of representation from BERT: pooled output from last transformer block, denoted by H, and posterior probabilities, denoted by P  There are two variants of BERT - BERT-Base and BERT-Large  In this work we are using BERT-Base for faster training and experimentation, however, our methods are applicable to BERT-Large as well  BERT-Base and BERT-Large are different in model parameters such as number of transformer blocks, number of self-attention heads  Total number of parameters in BERT-Base are 110M and 340M in BERT-Large 
BERT suffers from major limitations in terms of handling long sequences  Firstly, the self-attention layer has a quadratic complexity $O(n^2)$ in terms of the sequence length $n$ BIBREF0  Secondly, BERT uses a learned positional embeddings scheme BIBREF1, which means that it won't likely be able to generalize to positions beyond those seen in the training data 
To investigate the effect of fine-tuning BERT on task performance, we use either the pre-trained BERT weights, or the weights from a BERT fine-tuned on the task-specific dataset on a segment-level (i e  we preserve the original label but fine-tune on each segment separately instead of on the whole text sequence)

ground_truth: Unanswerable

LF-MMI Attention
Seq2Seq 
RNN-T 
Char E2E LF-MMI 
Phone E2E LF-MMI 
CTC + Gram-CTC

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. How does proposed qualitative annotation schema looks like?
Context 3:  We compare these results to using the fine-tuned segment-level BERT predictions directly as inputs to the next layer 
Method ::: Recurrence over BERT
Given that BERT is limited to a particular input length, we split the input sequence into segments of a fixed size with overlap  For each of these segments, we obtain H or P from BERT model  We then stack these segment-level representations into a sequence, which serves as input to a small (100-dimensional) LSTM layer  Its output serves as a document embedding  Finally, we use two fully connected layers with ReLU (30-dimensional) and softmax (the same dimensionality as the number of classes) activations to obtain the final predictions 
With this approach, we overcome BERT's computational complexity, reducing it to $O(n/k * k^2) = O(nk)$ for RoBERT, with $k$ denoting the segment size (the LSTM component has negligible linear complexity $O(k)$)  The positional embeddings are also no longer an issue 
Method ::: Transformer over BERT
Given that Transformers' edge over recurrent networks is their ability to effectively capture long distance relationships between words in a sequence BIBREF0, we experiment with replacing the LSTM recurrent layer in favor of a small Transformer model (2 layers of transformer building block containing self-attention, fully connected, etc )  To investigate if preserving the information about the input sequence order is important, we also build a variant of ToBERT which learns positional embeddings at the segment-level representations (but is limited to sequences of length seen during the training) 
ToBERT's computational complexity $O(\frac{n^2}{k^2})$ is asymptotically inferior to RoBERT, as the top-level Transformer model again suffers from quadratic complexity in the number of segments  However, in practice this number is much smaller than the input sequence length (${\frac{n}{k}} << n$), so we haven't observed performance or memory issues with our datasets 
Experiments
We evaluated our models on 3 different datasets:
CSAT dataset for CSAT prediction, consisting of spoken transcripts (automatic via ASR) 
20 newsgroups for topic identification task, consisting of written text;
Fisher Phase 1 corpus for topic identification task, consisting of spoken transcripts (manual);
Experiments ::: CSAT
CSAT dataset consists of US English telephone speech from call centers  For each call in this dataset, customers participated in that call gave a rating on his experience with agent  Originally, this dataset has labels rated on a scale 1-9 with 9 being extremely satisfied and 1 being extremely dissatisfied  Fig  FIGREF16 shows the histogram of ratings for our dataset  As the distribution is skewed towards extremes, we choose to do binary classification with ratings above 4 5 as satisfied and below 4 5 as dissatisfied  Quantization of ratings also helped us to create a balanced dataset  This dataset contains 4331 calls and we split them into 3 sets for our experiments: 2866 calls for training, 362 calls for validation and, finally, 1103 calls for testing 
We obtained the transcripts by employing an ASR system  The ASR system uses TDNN-LSTM acoustic model trained on Fisher and Switchboard datasets with lattice-free maximum mutual information criterion BIBREF18  The word error rates using four-gram language models were 9 2% and 17 3% respectively on Switchboard and CallHome portions of Eval2000 dataset 
Experiments ::: 20 newsgroups
20 newsgroups data set is one of the frequently used datasets in the text processing community for text classification and text clustering  This data set contains approximately 20,000 English documents from 20 topics to be identified, with 11314 documents for training and 7532 for testing  In this work, we used only 90% of documents for training and the remaining 10% for validation  For fair comparison with other publications, we used 53160 words vocabulary set available in the datasets website 
Experiments ::: Fisher
Fisher Phase 1 US English corpus is often used for automatic speech recognition in speech community  In this work, we used it for topic identification as in BIBREF3  The documents are 10-minute long telephone conversations between two people discussing a given topic  We used same training and test splits as BIBREF3 in which 1374 and 1372 documents are used for training and testing respectively  For validation of our model, we used 10% of training dataset and the remaining 90% was used for actual model training  The number of topics in this data set is 40 
Experiments ::: Dataset Statistics
Table TABREF22 shows statistics of our datasets  It can be observed that average length of Fisher is much higher than 20 newsgroups and CSAT  Cumulative distribution of document lengths for each dataset is shown in Fig  FIGREF21  It can be observed that almost all of the documents in Fisher dataset have length more than 1000 words  For CSAT, more than 50% of the documents have length greater than 500 and for 20newsgroups only 10% of the documents have length greater than 500  Note that, for CSAT and 20newsgroups, there are few documents with length more than 5000 
Experiments ::: Architecture and Training Details
In this work, we split document into segments of 200 tokens with a shift of 50 tokens to extract features from BERT model  For RoBERT, LSTM model is trained to minimize cross-entropy loss with Adam optimizer BIBREF19  The initial learning rate is set to $0 001$ and is reduced by a factor of $0 95$ if validation loss does not decrease for 3-epochs  For ToBERT, the Transformer is trained with the default BERT version of Adam optimizer BIBREF1 with an initial learning rate of $5e$-5

ground_truth: The resulting taxonomy of the framework is shown in Figure FIGREF10

FIGREF10

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. What datasets did they use for evaluation?
Context 3:  We report accuracy in all of our experiments  We chose a model with the best validation accuracy to calculate accuracy on the test set  To accomodate for non-determinism of some TensorFlow GPU operations, we report accuracy averaged over 5 runs 
Results
Table TABREF25 presents results using pre-trained BERT features  We extracted features from the pooled output of final transformer block as these were shown to be working well for most of the tasks BIBREF1  The features extracted from a pre-trained BERT model without any fine-tuning lead to a sub-par performance  However, We also notice that ToBERT model exploited the pre-trained BERT features better than RoBERT  It also converged faster than RoBERT  Table TABREF26 shows results using features extracted after fine-tuning BERT model with our datasets  Significant improvements can be observed compared to using pre-trained BERT features  Also, it can be noticed that ToBERT outperforms RoBERT on Fisher and 20newsgroups dataset by 13 63% and 0 81% respectively  On CSAT, ToBERT performs slightly worse than RoBERT but it is not statistically significant as this dataset is small 
Table TABREF27 presents results using fine-tuned BERT predictions instead of the pooled output from final transformer block  For each document, having obtained segment-wise predictions we can obtain final prediction for the whole document in three ways:
Compute the average of all segment-wise predictions and find the most probable class;
Find the most frequently predicted class;
Train a classification model 
It can be observed from Table TABREF27 that a simple averaging operation or taking most frequent predicted class works competitively for CSAT and 20newsgroups but not for the Fisher dataset  We believe the improvements from using RoBERT or ToBERT, compared to simple averaging or most frequent operations, are proportional to the fraction of long documents in the dataset  CSAT and 20newsgroups have (on average) significantly shorter documents than Fisher, as seen in Fig  FIGREF21  Also, significant improvements for Fisher could be because of less confident predictions from BERT model as this dataset has 40 classes  Fig  FIGREF31 presents the comparison of average voting and ToBERT for various document length ranges for Fisher dataset  We used fine-tuned BERT segment-level predictions (P) for this analysis  It can be observed that ToBERT outperforms average voting in every interval  To the best of our knowledge, this is a state-of-the-art result reported on the Fisher dataset 
Table TABREF32 presents the effect of position embeddings on the model performance  It can be observed that position embeddings did not significantly affect the model performance for Fisher and 20newsgroups, but they helped slightly in CSAT prediction (an absolute improvement of 0 64% F1-score)  We think that this is explained by the fact that Fisher and 20newsgroups are topic identification tasks, and the topic does not change much throughout these documents  However, CSAT may vary during the call, and in some cases a naive assumption that the sequential nature of the transcripts is irrelevant may lead to wrong conclusions 
Table TABREF33 compares our results with previous works  It can be seen that our model ToBERT outperforms CNN based experiments by significant margin on CSAT and Fisher datasets  For CSAT dataset, we used multi-scale CNN (MS-CNN) as the baseline, given its strong results on Fisher and 20newsgroups  The setup was replicated from BIBREF5 for comparison  We also see that our result on 20 newsgroups is 0 6% worse than the state-of-the-art 
Conclusions
In this paper, we presented two methods for long documents using BERT model: RoBERT and ToBERT  We evaluated our experiments on two classification tasks - customer satisfaction prediction and topic identification - using 3 datasets: CSAT, 20newsgroups and Fisher  We observed that ToBERT outperforms RoBERT on pre-trained BERT features and fine-tuned BERT features for all our tasks  Also, we noticed that fine-tuned BERT performs better than pre-trained BERT  We have shown that both RoBERT and ToBERT improved the simple baselines of taking an average (or the most frequent) of segment-wise predictions for long documents to obtain final prediction  Position embeddings did not significantly affect our models performance, but slightly improved the accuracy on the CSAT task  We obtained the best results on Fisher dataset and good improvements for CSAT task compared to the CNN baseline  It is interesting to note that the longer the average input in a given task, the bigger improvement we observe w r t  the baseline for that task  Our results confirm that both RoBERT and ToBERT can be used for long sequences with competitive performance and quick fine-tuning procedure  For future work, we shall focus on training models on long documents directly (i e  in an end-to-end manner) 

ground_truth: CSAT dataset, 20 newsgroups, Fisher Phase 1 corpus

CSAT dataset , 20 newsgroups, Fisher Phase 1 corpus