Knowledge-aware Attentive Neural Network for Ranking Question Answer Pairs

Ranking question answer pairs has attracted increasing attention recently due to its broad applications such as information retrieval and question answering (QA). Significant progresses have been made by deep neural networks. However, background information and hidden relations beyond the context, which play crucial roles in human text comprehension, have received little attention in recent deep neural networks that achieve the state of the art in ranking QA pairs. In the paper, we propose KABLSTM, a Knowledge-aware Attentive Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory, which leverages external knowledge from knowledge graphs (KG) to enrich the representational learning of QA sentences. Specifically, we develop a context-knowledge interactive learning architecture, in which a context-guided attentive convolutional neural network (CNN) is designed to integrate knowledge embeddings into sentence representations. Besides, a knowledge-aware attention mechanism is presented to attend interrelations between each segments of QA pairs. KABLSTM is evaluated on two widely-used benchmark QA datasets: WikiQA and TREC QA. Experiment results demonstrate that KABLSTM has robust superiority over competitors and sets state-of-the-art.