A System for Answering Simple Questions in Multiple Languages

Anton Razzhigaev, Mikhail Salnikov, Valentin Malykh, Pavel Braslavski, Alexander Panchenko


Abstract
Our research focuses on the most prevalent type of queries— simple questions —exemplified by questions like “What is the capital of France?”. These questions reference an entity such as “France”, which is directly connected (one hop) to the answer entity “Paris” in the underlying knowledge graph (KG). We propose a multilingual Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) technique that orders potential responses based on the distance between the question’s text embeddings and the answer’s graph embeddings. A system incorporating this novel method is also described in our work. Through comprehensive experimentation using various English and multilingual datasets and two KGs — Freebase and Wikidata — we illustrate the comparative advantage of the proposed method across diverse KG embeddings and languages. This edge is apparent even against robust baseline systems, including seq2seq QA models, search-based solutions and intricate rule-based pipelines. Interestingly, our research underscores that even advanced AI systems like ChatGPT encounter difficulties when tasked with answering simple questions. This finding emphasizes the relevance and effectiveness of our approach, which consistently outperforms such systems. We are making the source code and trained models from our study publicly accessible to promote further advancements in multilingual KGQA.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-demo.51
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Danushka Bollegala, Ruihong Huang, Alan Ritter
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
524–537
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-demo.51
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-demo.51
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anton Razzhigaev, Mikhail Salnikov, Valentin Malykh, Pavel Braslavski, and Alexander Panchenko. 2023. A System for Answering Simple Questions in Multiple Languages. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations), pages 524–537, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A System for Answering Simple Questions in Multiple Languages (Razzhigaev et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-demo.51.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-demo.51.mp4