Although transfer learning has been shown to be successful for tasks like
object and speech recognition, its applicability to question answering (QA) has
yet to be well-studied. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments to
investigate the transferability of knowledge learned from a source QA dataset
to a target dataset using two QA models. The performance of both models on a
TOEFL listening comprehension test (Tseng et al., 2016) and MCTest (Richardson
et al., 2013) is significantly improved via a simple transfer learning
technique from MovieQA (Tapaswi et al., 2016). In particular, one of the models
achieves the state-of-the-art on all target datasets; for the TOEFL listening
comprehension test, it outperforms the previous best model by 7%. Finally, we
show that transfer learning is helpful even in unsupervised scenarios when
correct answers for target QA dataset examples are not available.

本文探究了迁移学习在问题回答方面的应用，使用两种问题回答模型，在 TOEFL 和 MCTest 数据集上通过简单的迁移学习技术从 MovieQA 数据集中学到的知识显著提高了性能，尤其是其中一种模型在所有目标数据集上取得了最佳效果，对于 TOEFL 听力理解测试，它的性能比以前的最佳模型提高了 7%。最后，我们证明了即使在目标 QA 数据集示例的正确答案不可用的无监督情况下，迁移学习也是有帮助的。