Improving the robustness of machine reading comprehension model with hierarchical knowledge and auxiliary unanswerability prediction

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) aims to understand a passage and answer a series of related questions. With the development of deep learning and the release of large-scale MRC datasets, many end-to-end MRC neural networks have achieved remarkable success. However, these models are fragile and lack of robustness when there are some imperceptible adversarial perturbations in the input. In this paper, we propose an MRC model which has two main components to improve the robustness. On the one hand, we enhance the representation of the model by leveraging hierarchical knowledge from external knowledge bases. On the other hand, we introduce an auxiliary unanswerability prediction module and perform supervised multi-task learning along with a span prediction task. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our model can achieve consistent improvement compared with other strong baselines. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.