Deeply Embedded Knowledge Representation & Reasoning For Natural Language Question Answering: A Practitioner’s Perspective

Arindam Mitra, Sanjay Narayana, Chitta Baral


Abstract
Successful application of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is largely limited by the availability of a robust and general purpose natural language parser. Even though several projects have been launched in the pursuit of developing a universal meaning representation language, the existence of an accurate universal parser is far from reality. This has severely limited the application of knowledge representation and reasoning (KR) in the field of NLP and also prevented a proper evaluation of KR based NLU systems. Our goal is to build KR based systems for Natural Language Understanding without relying on a parser. Towards this we propose a method named Deeply Embedded Knowledge Representation & Reasoning (DeepEKR) where we replace the parser by a neural network, soften the symbolic representation so that a deterministic mapping exists between the parser neural network and the interpretable logical form, and finally replace the symbolic solver by an equivalent neural network, so the model can be trained end-to-end. We evaluate our method with respect to the task of Qualitative Word Problem Solving on the two available datasets (QuaRTz and QuaRel). Our system achieves same accuracy as that of the state-of-the-art accuracy on QuaRTz, outperforms the state-of-the-art on QuaRel and severely outperforms a traditional KR based system. The results show that the bias introduced by a KR solution does not prevent it from doing a better job at the end task. Moreover, our method is interpretable due to the bias introduced by the KR approach.
Anthology ID:
2020.spnlp-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Priyanka Agrawal, Zornitsa Kozareva, Julia Kreutzer, Gerasimos Lampouras, André Martins, Sujith Ravi, Andreas Vlachos
Venue:
spnlp
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
102–111
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.spnlp-1.12
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.spnlp-1.12
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arindam Mitra, Sanjay Narayana, and Chitta Baral. 2020. Deeply Embedded Knowledge Representation & Reasoning For Natural Language Question Answering: A Practitioner’s Perspective. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP, pages 102–111, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Deeply Embedded Knowledge Representation & Reasoning For Natural Language Question Answering: A Practitioner’s Perspective (Mitra et al., spnlp 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.spnlp-1.12.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38940152
Data
QuaRTzQuaRel