Extracting Common Inference Patterns from Semi-Structured Explanations

Sebastian Thiem, Peter Jansen


Abstract
Complex questions often require combining multiple facts to correctly answer, particularly when generating detailed explanations for why those answers are correct. Combining multiple facts to answer questions is often modeled as a “multi-hop” graph traversal problem, where a given solver must find a series of interconnected facts in a knowledge graph that, taken together, answer the question and explain the reasoning behind that answer. Multi-hop inference currently suffers from semantic drift, or the tendency for chains of reasoning to “drift”’ to unrelated topics, and this semantic drift greatly limits the number of facts that can be combined in both free text or knowledge base inference. In this work we present our effort to mitigate semantic drift by extracting large high-confidence multi-hop inference patterns, generated by abstracting large-scale explanatory structure from a corpus of detailed explanations. We represent these inference patterns as sets of generalized constraints over sentences represented as rows in a knowledge base of semi-structured tables. We present a prototype tool for identifying common inference patterns from corpora of semi-structured explanations, and use it to successfully extract 67 inference patterns from a “matter” subset of standardized elementary science exam questions that span scientific and world knowledge.
Anthology ID:
D19-6006
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Commonsense Inference in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Simon Ostermann, Sheng Zhang, Michael Roth, Peter Clark
Venue:
WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
53–65
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-6006
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-6006
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sebastian Thiem and Peter Jansen. 2019. Extracting Common Inference Patterns from Semi-Structured Explanations. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Commonsense Inference in Natural Language Processing, pages 53–65, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Extracting Common Inference Patterns from Semi-Structured Explanations (Thiem & Jansen, 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-6006.pdf