# Transfer Learning Enhanced Single-choice Decision for Multi-choice Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17949 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17949/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [RACE: Large-scale ReAding Comprehension Dataset From Examinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04683/) (2017)
- [CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07042/) (2018)
- [The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07040/) (2017)
- [UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00700/) (2020)
- [DREAM: A Challenge Dataset and Models for Dialogue-Based Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00164/) (2019)
- [DuReader: a Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset from Real-world Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05073/) (2017)
- [The Goldilocks Principle: Reading Children's Books with Explicit Memory Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02301/) (2015)
- [Dual Co-Matching Network for Multi-choice Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09381/) (2019)
- [MMM: Multi-stage Multi-task Learning for Multi-choice Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00458/) (2019)
- [Option Comparison Network for Multiple-choice Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03033/) (2019)
- [Towards Interpreting BERT for Reading Comprehension Based QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08983/) (2020)
- [Two is Better than Many? Binary Classification as an Effective Approach to Multi-Choice Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16495/) (2022)
- [DUMA: Reading Comprehension with Transposition Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09415/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-choice Machine Reading Comprehension (MMRC) aims to select the correct answer from a set of options based on a given passage and question. The existing methods employ the pre-trained language model as the encoder, share and transfer knowledge through fine-tuning.These methods mainly focus on the design of exquisite mechanisms to effectively capture the relationships among the triplet of passage, question and answers. It is non-trivial but ignored to transfer knowledge from other MRC tasks such as SQuAD due to task specific of MMRC.In this paper, we reconstruct multi-choice to single-choice by training a binary classification to distinguish whether a certain answer is correct. Then select the option with the highest confidence score as the final answer. Our proposed method gets rid of the multi-choice framework and can leverage resources of other tasks. We construct our model based on the ALBERT-xxlarge model and evaluate it on the RACE and DREAM datasets. Experimental results show that our model performs better than multi-choice methods. In addition, by transferring knowledge from other kinds of MRC tasks, our model achieves state-of-the-art results in both single and ensemble settings.