Re:Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything
by nl on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @12:09AM
(#22177639)
There's active work on this (although in two separate strands of research).
The first is multi-document summarization. Back in 2018 Google published Generating Wikipedia by Summarizing Long Sequences[1] which did a great job of combining multiple pages into a single Wikipedia-like document. Models have strengthened a lot since then so it should be possible to do better, but I haven't seen any work.
There's also a bunch of work on summarization of a single document into a few sentences.
The second piece of research work is Question Answering. There are multiple directions for that, but looking at recent work on the SQUAD 2.0 leaderboard should give you a good idea of what is possible[2].
Basically, combining these systems should work quite well a lot of the time.
The first is multi-document summarization. Back in 2018 Google published Generating Wikipedia by Summarizing Long Sequences[1] which did a great job of combining multiple pages into a single Wikipedia-like document. Models have strengthened a lot since then so it should be possible to do better, but I haven't seen any work.
There's also a bunch of work on summarization of a single document into a few sentences.
The second piece of research work is Question Answering. There are multiple directions for that, but looking at recent work on the SQUAD 2.0 leaderboard should give you a good idea of what is possible[2].
Basically, combining these systems should work quite well a lot of the time.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.10198
[2] https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/