Multigranularity Syntax Guidance with Graph Structure for Machine Reading Comprehension

In recent years, pre-trained language models, represented by the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model, have achieved remarkable success in machine reading comprehension (MRC). However, limited by the structure of BERT-based MRC models (for example, restrictions on word count), such models cannot effectively integrate significant features, such as syntax relations, semantic connections, and long-distance semantics between sentences, leading to the inability of the available models to better understand the intrinsic connections between text and questions to be answered based on it. In this paper, a multi-granularity syntax guidance (MgSG) module that consists of a “graph with dependence” module and a “graph with entity” module is proposed. MgSG selects both sentence and word granularities to guide the text model to decipher the text. In particular, syntactic constraints are used to guide the text model while exploiting the global nature of graph neural networks to enhance the model’s ability to construct long-range semantics. Simultaneously, named entities play an important role in text and answers and focusing on entities can improve the model’s understanding of the text’s major idea. Ultimately, fusing multiple embedding representations to form a representation yields the semantics of the context and the questions. Experiments demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset is better when compared with the traditional BERT baseline model. The experimental results illustrate that our proposed “MgSG” module effectively utilizes the graph structure to learn the internal features of sentences, solve the problem of long-distance semantics, while effectively improving the performance of PrLM in machine reading comprehension.