Repurposing Entailment for Multi-Hop Question Answering Tasks

Harsh Trivedi, Heeyoung Kwon, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, Niranjan Balasubramanian


Abstract
Question Answering (QA) naturally reduces to an entailment problem, namely, verifying whether some text entails the answer to a question. However, for multi-hop QA tasks, which require reasoning with multiple sentences, it remains unclear how best to utilize entailment models pre-trained on large scale datasets such as SNLI, which are based on sentence pairs. We introduce Multee, a general architecture that can effectively use entailment models for multi-hop QA tasks. Multee uses (i) a local module that helps locate important sentences, thereby avoiding distracting information, and (ii) a global module that aggregates information by effectively incorporating importance weights. Importantly, we show that both modules can use entailment functions pre-trained on a large scale NLI datasets. We evaluate performance on MultiRC and OpenBookQA, two multihop QA datasets. When using an entailment function pre-trained on NLI datasets, Multee outperforms QA models trained only on the target QA datasets and the OpenAI transformer models.
Anthology ID:
N19-1302
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2948–2958
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1302
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1302
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Harsh Trivedi, Heeyoung Kwon, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, and Niranjan Balasubramanian. 2019. Repurposing Entailment for Multi-Hop Question Answering Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 2948–2958, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Repurposing Entailment for Multi-Hop Question Answering Tasks (Trivedi et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1302.pdf
Code
 StonyBrookNLP/multee +  additional community code
Data
MultiNLIOpenBookQARACESNLI