Answer retrieval is to find the most aligned answer from a large set of candidates given a question. Learning vector representations of questions/answers is the key factor. Question-answer alignment and question/answer semantics are two important signals for learning the representations. Existing methods learned semantic representations with dual encoders or dual variational auto-encoders. The semantic information was learned from language models or question-to-question (answer-to-answer) generative processes. However, the alignment and semantics were too separate to capture the aligned semantics between question and answer. In this work, we propose to cross variational auto-encoders by generating questions with aligned answers and generating answers with aligned questions. Experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art answer retrieval method on SQuAD.

Textual patterns (e.g., Country’s president Person) are specified and/or generated for extracting factual information from unstructured data. Pattern-based information extraction methods have been recognized for their efficiency and transferability. However, not every pattern is reliable: A major challenge is to derive the most complete and accurate facts from diverse and sometimes conflicting extractions. In this work, we propose a probabilistic graphical model which formulates fact extraction in a generative process. It automatically infers true facts and pattern reliability without any supervision. It has two novel designs specially for temporal facts: (1) it models pattern reliability on two types of time signals, including temporal tag in text and text generation time; (2) it models commonsense constraints as observable variables. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing methods on extracting true temporal facts from news data.