Prompting Large Language Models with Chain-of-Thought for Few-Shot Knowledge Base Question Generation

Yuanyuan Liang, Jianing Wang, Hanlun Zhu, Lei Wang, Weining Qian, Yunshi Lan


Abstract
The task of Question Generation over Knowledge Bases (KBQG) aims to convert a logical form into a natural language question. For the sake of expensive cost of large-scale question annotation, the methods of KBQG under low-resource scenarios urgently need to be developed. However, current methods heavily rely on annotated data for fine-tuning, which is not well-suited for few-shot question generation. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown their impressive generalization ability in few-shot tasks. Inspired by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, which is an in-context learning strategy for reasoning, we formulate KBQG task as a reasoning problem, where the generation of a complete question is splitted into a series of sub-question generation. Our proposed prompting method KQG-CoT first retrieves supportive logical forms from the unlabeled data pool taking account of the characteristics of the logical form. Then, we write a prompt to explicit the reasoning chain of generating complicated questions based on the selected demonstrations. To further ensure prompt quality, we extend KQG-CoT into KQG-CoT+ via sorting the logical forms by their complexity. We conduct extensive experiments over three public KBQG datasets. The results demonstrate that our prompting method consistently outperforms other prompting baselines on the evaluated datasets. Remarkably, our KQG-CoT+ method could surpass existing few-shot SoTA results of the PathQuestions dataset by 18.25, 10.72, and 10.18 absolute points on BLEU-4, METEOR, and ROUGE-L, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.263
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4329–4343
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.263
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.263
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanyuan Liang, Jianing Wang, Hanlun Zhu, Lei Wang, Weining Qian, and Yunshi Lan. 2023. Prompting Large Language Models with Chain-of-Thought for Few-Shot Knowledge Base Question Generation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4329–4343, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Prompting Large Language Models with Chain-of-Thought for Few-Shot Knowledge Base Question Generation (Liang et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.263.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.263.mp4