A multi-view fusion neural network for answer selection

Community question answering aims at choosing the most appropriate answer for a given question, which is important in many NLP applications. Previous neural network-based methods consider several different aspects of information through calculating attentions. These different kinds of attentions are always simply summed up and can be seen as a “single view”, causing severe information loss. To overcome this problem, we propose a Multi-View Fusion Neural Network, where each attention component generates a “view” of the QA pair and a fusion RNN integrates the generated views to form a more holistic representation. In this fusion RNN method, a filter gate collects important information of input and directly adds it to the output, which borrows the idea of residual networks. Experimental results on the WikiQA and SemEval-2016 CQA datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.