Confabulation based sentence completion for machine reading

Abstract

Sentence completion and prediction refers to the capability of filling missing words in any incomplete sentences. It is one of the keys to reading comprehension, thus making sentence completion an indispensible component of machine reading. Cogent confabulation is a bio-inspired computational model that mimics the human information processing. The building of confabulation knowledge base uses an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that extracts the relations between objects at the symbolic level. In this work, we propose performance improved training and recall algorithms that apply the cogent confabulation model to solve the sentence completion problem. Our training algorithm adopts a two-level hash table, which significantly improves the training speed, so that a large knowledge base can be built at relatively low computation cost. The proposed recall function fills missing words based on the sentence context. Experimental results show that our software can complete trained sentences with 100% accuracy. It also gives semantically correct answers to more than two thirds of the testing sentences that have not been trained before.