  Previous work combines word-level and character-level representations using
concatenation or scalar weighting, which is suboptimal for high-level tasks
like reading comprehension. We present a fine-grained gating mechanism to
dynamically combine word-level and character-level representations based on
properties of the words. We also extend the idea of fine-grained gating to
modeling the interaction between questions and paragraphs for reading
comprehension. Experiments show that our approach can improve the performance
on reading comprehension tasks, achieving new state-of-the-art results on the
Children's Book Test dataset. To demonstrate the generality of our gating
mechanism, we also show improved results on a social media tag prediction task.
