DepWiGNN: A Depth-wise Graph Neural Network for Multi-hop Spatial Reasoning in Text

Shuaiyi Li, Yang Deng, Wai Lam


Abstract
Spatial reasoning in text plays a crucial role in various real-world applications. Existing approaches for spatial reasoning typically infer spatial relations from pure text, which overlook the gap between natural language and symbolic structures. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have showcased exceptional proficiency in inducing and aggregating symbolic structures. However, classical GNNs face challenges in handling multi-hop spatial reasoning due to the over-smoothing issue, i.e., the performance decreases substantially as the number of graph layers increases. To cope with these challenges, we propose a novel Depth-Wise Graph Neural Network (DepWiGNN). Specifically, we design a novel node memory scheme and aggregate the information over the depth dimension instead of the breadth dimension of the graph, which empowers the ability to collect long dependencies without stacking multiple layers. Experimental results on two challenging multi-hop spatial reasoning datasets show that DepWiGNN outperforms existing spatial reasoning methods. The comparisons with the other three GNNs further demonstrate its superiority in capturing long dependency in the graph.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.428
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6459–6471
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.428
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.428
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuaiyi Li, Yang Deng, and Wai Lam. 2023. DepWiGNN: A Depth-wise Graph Neural Network for Multi-hop Spatial Reasoning in Text. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 6459–6471, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DepWiGNN: A Depth-wise Graph Neural Network for Multi-hop Spatial Reasoning in Text (Li et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.428.pdf