S&I Reader: Multi-Granularity Gated Multi-Hop Skimming and Intensive Reading Model for Machine Reading Comprehension

Machine reading comprehension is a very challenging task, which aims to determine the answer span based on the given context and question. The newly developed pre-training language model has achieved a series of successes in various natural language understanding tasks with its powerful contextual representation ability. However, these pre-training language models generally lack the downstream processing structure for specific tasks, which limits further performance improvement. In order to solve this problem and deepen the model’s understanding of the question and context, this paper proposes S&I Reader. On the basis of the pre-training model, skimming, intensive reading, and gated mechanism modules are added to simulate the behavior of humans reading text and filtering information. Based on the idea of granular computing, a multi-granularity module for computing context granularity and sequence granularity is added to the model to simulate the behavior of human beings to understand the text from words to sentences, from parts to the whole. Compared with the previous machine reading comprehension model, our model structure is novel. The skimming module and multi-granularity module proposed in this paper are used to solve the problem that the previous model ignores the key information of the text and cannot understand the text with multi granularity. Experiments show that the model proposed in this paper is effective for both Chinese and English datasets. It can better understand the question and context and give a more accurate answer. The performance has made new progress on the basis of the baseline model.