Challenge: Existing work on question answering tasks only provide weak supervision for how the answer should be computed . weak supervision is attractive because it is relatively easy to gather, allowing for large datasets . but weak supervision complicates learning because there are many different spurious ways to derive the correct answer.
Approach: They propose a method to convert question answering tasks into discrete latent variable learning problems with a precomputed set of possible solutions that contains one correct option.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms previous methods on six QA tasks and achieves state-of-the-art on five of them.

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