We present the Natural Questions corpus, a question answering data set. Questions consist of real anonymized, aggregated queries issued to the Google search engine. An annotator is presented with a question along with a Wikipedia page from the top 5 search results, and annotates a long answer (typically a paragraph) and a short answer (one or more entities) if present on the page, or marks null if no long/short answer is present. The public release consists of 307,373 training examples with single annotations; 7,830 examples with 5-way annotations for development data; and a further 7,842 examples with 5-way annotated sequestered as test data. We present experiments validating quality of the data. We also describe analysis of 25-way annotations on 302 examples, giving insights into human variability on the annotation task. We introduce robust metrics for the purposes of evaluating question answering systems; demonstrate high human upper bounds on these metrics; and establish baseline results using competitive methods drawn from related literature.

Microblogs present an excellent opportunity for monitoring and analyzing world happenings. Given that words are often ambiguous, entity linking becomes a crucial step towards understanding microblogs. In this paper, we re-examine the problem of entity linking on microblogs. We first observe that spatiotemporal ( i.e. , spatial and temporal) signals play a key role, but they are not utilized in existing approaches. Thus, we propose a novel entity linking framework that incorporates spatiotemporal signals through a weakly supervised process. Using entity annotations on real-world data, our experiments show that the spatiotemporal model improves F1 by more than 10 points over existing systems. Finally, we present a qualitative study to visualize the effectiveness of our approach.

Due to the nature of complex NLP problems, structured prediction algorithms have been important modeling tools for a wide range of tasks. While there exists evidence showing that linear Structural Support Vector Machine (SSVM) algorithm performs better than structured Perceptron, the SSVM algorithm is still less frequently chosen in the NLP community because of its relatively slow training speed. In this paper, we propose a fast and easy-to-implement dual coordinate descent algorithm for SSVMs. Unlike algorithms such as Perceptron and stochastic gradient descent, our method keeps track of dual variables and updates the weight vector more aggressively. As a result, this training process is as efficient as existing online learning methods, and yet derives consistently better models, as evaluated on four benchmark NLP datasets for part-of-speech tagging, named-entity recognition and dependency parsing.