In this paper, we present a fast and strong neural approach for general purpose text matching applications. We explore what is sufficient to build a fast and well-performed text matching model and propose to keep three key features available for inter-sequence alignment: original point-wise features, previous aligned features, and contextual features while simplifying all the remaining components. We conduct experiments on four well-studied benchmark datasets across tasks of natural language inference, paraphrase identification and answer selection. The performance of our model is on par with the state-of-the-art on all datasets with much fewer parameters and the inference speed is at least 6 times faster compared with similarly performed ones.
@cite_24: 
@cite_21: We propose a stochastic answer network (SAN) to explore multi-step inference strategies in Natural Language Inference. Rather than directly predicting the results given the inputs, the model maintains a state and iteratively refines its predictions. Our experiments show that SAN achieves the state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks: Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset, MultiGenre Natural Language Inference (MultiNLI) dataset and Quora Question Pairs dataset.
@cite_3: Sentence matching is widely used in various natural language tasks such as natural language inference, paraphrase identification, and question answering. For these tasks, understanding logical and semantic relationship between two sentences is required but it is yet challenging. Although attention mechanism is useful to capture the semantic relationship and to properly align the elements of two sentences, previous methods of attention mechanism simply use a summation operation which does not retain original features enough. Inspired by DenseNet, a densely connected convolutional network, we propose a densely-connected co-attentive recurrent neural network, each layer of which uses concatenated information of attentive features as well as hidden features of all the preceding recurrent layers. It enables preserving the original and the co-attentive feature information from the bottommost word embedding layer to the uppermost recurrent layer. To alleviate the problem of an ever-increasing size of feature vectors due to dense concatenation operations, we also propose to use an autoencoder after dense concatenation. We evaluate our proposed architecture on highly competitive benchmark datasets related to sentence matching. Experimental results show that our architecture, which retains recurrent and attentive features, achieves state-of-the-art performances for most of the tasks.
More effective models can be built if inter-sequence matching is allowed to be performed more than once. CSRAN @cite_24 performs multi-level attention refinement with dense connections among multiple levels. DRCN @cite_3 stacks encoding and alignment layers. It concatenates all previously aligned results and has to use an autoencoder to deal with exploding feature spaces. SAN @cite_21 utilizes recurrent networks to combine multiple alignment results. This paper also proposes a deep architecture based on a new way to connect consecutive blocks named augmented residual connections, to distill previous aligned information which serves as an important feature for text matching.