Bridging The Gap: Entailment Fused-T5 for Open-retrieval Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension

Open-retrieval conversational machine reading comprehension (OCMRC) simulates real-life conversational interaction scenes. Machines are required to make a decision of Yes/No/Inquire or generate a follow-up question when the decision is Inquire based on retrieved rule texts, user scenario, user question and dialogue history. Recent studies try to reduce the information gap between decision-making and question generation, in order to improve the performance of generation. However, the information gap still persists because these methods are still limited in pipeline framework, where decision-making and question generation are performed separately, making it hard to share the entailment reasoning used in decision-making across all stages. To tackle the above problem, we propose a novel one-stage end-to-end framework, called Entailment Fused-T5 (EFT), to bridge the information gap between decision-making and question generation in a global understanding manner. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the OR-ShARC benchmark. Our model and code are publicly available.