Improving Question Answering by Commonsense-Based Pre-training

Although neural network approaches achieve remarkable success on a variety of NLP tasks, many of them struggle to answer questions that require commonsense knowledge. We believe the main reason is the lack of commonsense connections between concepts. To remedy this, we provide a simple and effective method that leverages external commonsense knowledge base such as ConceptNet. We pre-train direct and indirect relational functions between concepts, and show that these pre-trained functions could be easily added to existing neural network models. Results show that incorporating commonsense-based function improves the state-of-the-art on three question answering tasks that require commonsense reasoning. Further analysis shows that our system discovers and leverages useful evidence from an external commonsense knowledge base, which is missing in existing neural network models and help derive the correct answer.