Explainable question answering for science questions is a challenging task that requires multi-hop inference over a large set of fact sentences. To counter the limitations of methods that view each query-document pair in isolation, we propose the LSTM-Interleaved Transformer which incorporates cross-document interactions for improved multi-hop ranking. The LIT architecture can leverage prior ranking positions in the re-ranking setting. Our model is competitive on the current leaderboard for the TextGraphs 2020 shared task, achieving a test-set MAP of 0.5607, and would have gained third place had we submitted before the competition deadline. Our code implementation is made available at https://github.com/mdda/worldtree_corpus/tree/textgraphs_2020

The TextGraphs-13 Shared Task on Explanation Regeneration asked participants to develop methods to reconstruct gold explanations for elementary science questions. Red Dragon AI's entries used the language of the questions and explanation text directly, rather than a constructing a separate graph-like representation. Our leaderboard submission placed us 3rd in the competition, but we present here three methods of increasing sophistication, each of which scored successively higher on the test set after the competition close.

I am a broadly interdisciplinary artificial intelligence researcher specializing in natural language processing and methods inspired by cognition and the brain. I apply these to application areas in science and health care. A central focus of my science research is on how we can teach computers question answering in the form of passing standardized science exams, as written. In particular, I focus on methods of automated inference that generate explanations for why the answer is correct, largely using graph-based methods. In terms of health care, I study how we can use natural language processing and inference to improve electronic health records and improve nurse communication, as well as detect potentially dangerous clinical events before they happen.