Chain-of-Question: A Progressive Question Decomposition Approach for Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering

Peng Yixing, Quan Wang, Licheng Zhang, Yi Liu, Zhendong Mao


Abstract
Complex KBQA leverages the knowledge base (KB) to answer complex natural questions involving complicated semantics like multi-hop reasoning. Existing methods involve a question decomposition process, i.e., breaking a complex question into several simpler sub-questions, to assist obtaining logical forms for querying the KB. However, existing question decomposition process derives all sub-questions directly according to the original question, resulting in limitations when one sub-question relies on the answer from a previous one. In this work, we propose Chain-of-Question, a progressive question decomposition approach to address complex KBQA challenges. First, inspired by chain-of-thought, we design a prompt to guide LLM to sequentially decompose multiple semantically clear sub-questions and provide corresponding reference answers, where each step of the decomposition relies on the previous results. Next, we utilize the decomposition result to select relevant patterns (relation-entity pairs) as accurate and faithful auxiliary information for the following logical form generation. Finally, we jointly perform logical form generation and answer prediction, utilizing the predicted answer to supplement non-executable logical forms. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.283
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4763–4776
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.283
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.283
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peng Yixing, Quan Wang, Licheng Zhang, Yi Liu, and Zhendong Mao. 2024. Chain-of-Question: A Progressive Question Decomposition Approach for Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 4763–4776, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Chain-of-Question: A Progressive Question Decomposition Approach for Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering (Yixing et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.283.pdf