TRACE the Evidence: Constructing Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning Chains for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Jinyuan Fang, Zaiqiao Meng, Craig MacDonald


Abstract
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers an effective approach for addressing question answering (QA) tasks. However, the imperfections of the retrievers in RAG models often result in the retrieval of irrelevant information, which could introduce noise and degrade the performance, especially when handling multi-hop questions that require multiple steps of reasoning. To enhance the multi-hop reasoning ability of RAG models, we propose TRACE. TRACE constructs knowledge-grounded reasoning chains, which are a series of logically connected knowledge triples, to identify and integrate supporting evidence from the retrieved documents for answering questions. Specifically, TRACE employs a KG Generator to create a knowledge graph (KG) from the retrieved documents, and then uses a novel Autoregressive Reasoning Chain Constructor to build reasoning chains. Experimental results on three multi-hop QA datasets show that TRACE achieves an average performance improvement of up to 14.03% compared to using all the retrieved documents. Moreover, the results indicate that using reasoning chains as context, rather than the entire documents, is often sufficient to correctly answer questions.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.496
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8472–8494
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.496
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jinyuan Fang, Zaiqiao Meng, and Craig MacDonald. 2024. TRACE the Evidence: Constructing Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning Chains for Retrieval-Augmented Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 8472–8494, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TRACE the Evidence: Constructing Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning Chains for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Fang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.496.pdf