Too Many Questions? What Can We Do? : Multiple Question Span Detection

Abstract

When a human interacts with an information retrieval chat bot, he/she can ask multiple questions at the same time. Current question answering systems can’t handle this scenario effectively. In this paper we propose an approach to identify question spans in a given utterance, by posing this as a sequence labeling problem. The model is trained and evaluated over 4 different freely available datasets. To get a comprehensive coverage of the compound question scenarios, we also synthesize a dataset based on the natural question combination patterns. We exhibit improvement in the performance of the DrQA system when it encounters compound questions which suggests that this approach is vital for real-time human-chatbot interaction.