DuReader is a new large-scale real-world and human sourced MRC dataset in Chinese. DuReader focuses on real-world open-domain question answering. The advantages of DuReader over existing datasets are concluded as follows:

• Real question
• Real article
• Real answer
• Real application scenario
• Rich annotation

DuReader system implements 2 classic reading comprehension models(BiDAF and Match-LSTM) on DuReader dataset. The system is implemented with 2 frameworks: PaddlePaddle and TensorFlow.

To Download DuReader dataset:

cd data && bash download.sh

For more details about DuReader dataset please refer to DuReader Homepage.

We use Bleu and Rouge as evaluation metrics, the calculation of these metrics relies on the scoring scripts under "https://github.com/tylin/coco-caption", to download them, run:

cd utils && bash download_thirdparty.sh

After the dataset is downloaded, there is still some work to do to run the baseline systems. DuReader dataset offers rich amount of documents for every user question, the documents are too long for popular RC models to cope with. In our baseline models, we preprocess the train set and development set data by selecting the paragraph that is most related to the answer string, while for inferring(no available golden answer), we select the paragraph that is most related to the question string. The preprocessing strategy is implemented in utils/preprocess.py. To preprocess the raw data, you should first segment 'question', 'title', 'paragraphs' and then store the segemented result into 'segmented_question', 'segmented_title', 'segmented_paragraphs' like the downloaded preprocessed data, then run:

cat data/raw/trainset/search.train.json | python utils/preprocess.py > data/preprocessed/trainset/search.train.json

The preprocessed data can be automatically downloaded by data/download.sh, and is stored in data/preprocessed, the raw data before preprocessing is under data/raw.

Once the preprocessed data is ready, you can run utils/get_vocab.py to generate the vocabulary file, for example, if you want to train model with Baidu Search data:

python utils/get_vocab.py --files data/preprocessed/trainset/search.train.json data/preprocessed/devset/search.dev.json  --vocab data/vocab.search

If you want to use the demo data, run:

python utils/get_vocab.py --files data/demo/trainset/search.train.json data/demo/devset/search.dev.json  --vocab data/demo/vocab.search

For now we've only tested on PaddlePaddle v0.10.5, to install PaddlePaddle and for more details about PaddlePaddle, see PaddlePaddle Homepage.

We implement 3 models with PaddlePaddle: Match-LSTM, BiDAF, and a classification model for data with query_type='YES_NO', the model simply replaces the Pointer-Net on top of Match-LSTM model with a one-layered classifier. The 3 implemented models can all be trained and inferred by run run.py, to specify the model to train or to infer, use --algo [mlstm|bidaf|yesno], for complete usage run python run.py -h.

The basic training and inference process has been wrapped in run.sh, the basic usage is:

bash run.sh EXPERIMENT_NAME ALGO_NAME TASK_NAME

EXPERIMENT_NAME can be any legal folder name, ALGO_NAME should be bidaf, mlstm or yesno for the 3 models have been implemented. For example, to train a model with BiDAF, run:

bash run.sh test_bidaf bidaf train

run.sh creates a folder named models, and for every experiment a folder named EXPERIMENT_NAME is created under models, the basic experiment folder layout should be like:

models
└── test_bidaf
    ├── env
    ├── infer
    ├── log
    └── models

For training, all scripts the experiment uses will first be copied to env, and then run from there, and inference process is also run from env. infer folder keeps the result file created by inference, log folder keeps training and inference logs, and models folder keeps the models saved during training.

Because our datatset and the model capacity is very large, if it's out of your device's capacity to successfully run the whole process, you can try with the shipped demo data, just use run_demo.sh for training and inferring,the usage is the same as run.sh

To infer a trained model, run the same command as training and change train to infer, and add --testset <path_to_testset> argument. for example, suppose the 'test_bidaf' experiment is successfully trained, to infer the saved models, run:

bash run.sh test_bidaf bidaf infer --testset ../data/preprocessed/testset/search.test.json

The results corresponding to each model saved is under infer folder, and the evaluation metrics is logged into the infer log files under log.

Note if you want to infer a 'yesno' model, please specify an inferred result of a RC model, i.e. 'bidaf' or 'mlstm', under models/SOME_RC_MODEL/infer/, to --testset, because the 'yesno' model need the result answer of a RC model as its input.

You can infer and evaluate your models on development data set locally by following the above steps, once you've developed a model that works to your expectation on the dev set, we highly recommend you to submit your inference result on the released test set to us to evaluate. To get inference file on test set:

1. make sure the training is over.
2. infer your models on dev set and pick the best model.
3. keep only the best model under models/<EXPERIMENT_NAME>/models.
4. infer again with test set.
5. submit the infer result file.

We also implements the BIDAF and Match-LSTM models based on Tensorflow 1.0. You can refer to the official guide for the installation of Tensorflow. The complete options for running our Tensorflow program can be accessed by using python run.py -h. Here we demonstrate a typical workflow as follows:

Before training the model, we have to make sure that the data is ready. For preparation, we will check the data files, make directories and extract a vocabulary for later use. You can run the following command to do this with a specified task name:

python run.py --prepare

You can specify the files for train/dev/test by setting the train_files/dev_files/test_files. By default, we use the data in data/demo/

To train the reading comprehension model, you can specify the model type by using --algo [BIDAF|MLSTM] and you can also set the hyper-parameters such as the learning rate by using --learning_rate NUM. For example, to train a BIDAF model for 10 epochs, you can run:

python run.py --train --algo BIDAF --epochs 10

The training process includes an evaluation on the dev set after each training epoch. By default, the model with the least Bleu-4 score on the dev set will be saved.

To conduct a single evaluation on the dev set with the the model already trained, you can run the following command:

python run.py --evaluate --algo BIDAF

You can also predict answers for the samples in some files using the following command:

python run.py --predict --algo BIDAF --test_files ../data/demo/devset/search.dev.json 

By default, the results are saved at ../data/results/ folder. You can change this by specifying --result_dir DIR_PATH.

To help evaluate the system performance on multilingual datasets, we provide scripts to convert MS MARCO V2 data from its format to DuReader format.

MS MARCO (Microsoft Machine Reading Comprehension) is an English dataset focused on machine reading comprehension and question answering. The design of MS MARCO and DuReader is similar. It is worthwhile examining the MRC systems on both Chinese (DuReader) and English (MS MARCO) datasets.

You can download MS MARCO V2 data, and run the following scripts to convert the data from MS MARCO V2 format to DuReader format. Then, you can run and evaluate our DuReader baselines or your DuReader systems on MS MARCO data.

./run_marco2dureader_preprocess.sh ../data/marco/train_v2.1.json ../data/marco/train_v2.1_dureaderformat.json
./run_marco2dureader_preprocess.sh ../data/marco/dev_v2.1.json ../data/marco/dev_v2.1_dureaderformat.json

Copyright 2017 Baidu.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.