Explainable question answering (XQA) aims to answer a given question and provide an explanation why the answer is selected. Existing XQA methods focus on reasoning on a single knowledge source, e.g., structured knowledge bases, unstructured corpora, etc. However, integrating information from heterogeneous knowledge sources is essential to answer complex questions. In this paper, we propose to leverage question decomposing for heterogeneous knowledge integration, by breaking down a complex question into simpler ones, and selecting the appropriate knowledge source for each sub-question. To facilitate reasoning, we propose a novel two-stage XQA framework, Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree (RoHT). First, we build the Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree (HQDT) to understand the semantics of a complex question; then, we conduct probabilistic reasoning over HQDT from root to leaves recursively, to aggregate heterogeneous knowledge at different tree levels and search for a best solution considering the decomposing and answering probabilities. The experiments on complex QA datasets KQA Pro and Musique show that our framework outperforms SOTA methods significantly, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging question decomposing for knowledge integration and our RoHT framework.

In passage retrieval system, the initial passage retrieval results may be unsatisfactory, which can be refined by a reranking scheme. Existing solutions to passage reranking focus on enriching the interaction between query and each passage separately, neglecting the context among the top-ranked passages in the initial retrieval list. To tackle this problem, we propose a Hybrid and Collaborative Passage Reranking (HybRank) method, which leverages the substantial similarity measurements of upstream retrievers for passage collaboration and incorporates the lexical and semantic properties of sparse and dense retrievers for reranking. Besides, built on off-the-shelf retriever features, HybRank is a plug-in reranker capable of enhancing arbitrary passage lists including previously reranked ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate the stable improvements of performance over prevalent retrieval and reranking methods, and verify the effectiveness of the core components of HybRank.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, they tend to generate factually incorrect reasoning steps when the required knowledge is not available or up-to-date in models’ parameters. Recent works turn to retrieving external knowledge to augment CoT reasoning. Despite being promising, these chain-based methods suffer from: 1) Negative retrieval. Unnecessary or incorrect retrieval may mislead the reasoning; 2) Limited sight. Lacking the ability to look backward or forward, a local error in one step will propagate along the chain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach: Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning (ProbTree). First, LLMs translate a complex question into a query tree, in which each non-root node denotes a sub-question of its parent node. Then, probabilistic reasoning is conducted over the tree, by solving questions from leaf to root considering the confidence of both question decomposing and answering. During reasoning, for leaf nodes, LLMs choose a more confident answer from Closed-book QA that employs parametric knowledge and Open-book QA that employs retrieved external knowledge, thus eliminating the negative retrieval problem. For non-leaf nodes, with the hierarchical structure, LLMs have broader sights and are able to globally reason with the information from child nodes, thus recovering from local errors. The experiments on three Complex QA datasets under the open-domain setting show that our approach outperforms SOTA methods significantly, demonstrating the effect of probabilistic tree-of-thought reasoning.

Subject to the huge semantic gap between natural and formal languages, neural semantic parsing is typically bottlenecked by its complexity of dealing with both input semantics and output syntax. Recent works have proposed several forms of supplementary supervision but none is generalized across multiple formal languages. This paper proposes a unified intermediate representation for graph query languages, named GraphQ IR. It has a natural-language-like expression that bridges the semantic gap and formally defined syntax that maintains the graph structure. Therefore, a neural semantic parser can more precisely convert user queries into GraphQ IR, which can be later losslessly compiled into various downstream graph query languages. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks including KQA Pro, Overnight, GrailQA, and MetaQA-Cypher under the standard i.i.d., out-of-distribution, and low-resource settings validate GraphQ IR’s superiority over the previous state-of-the-arts with a maximum 11% accuracy improvement.

General pre-trained language models (PLMs), such as BERT, have achieved remarkable performance on various NLP tasks. Recently, domain-specific PLMs have been proposed to boost the task performance of specific domains (e.g., biomedical and computer science) by continuing to pre-train general PLMs with domain-specific corpora. However, this domain-adaptive pre-training (DAPT (CITATION)) tends to forget the previous general knowledge acquired by general PLMs, which leads to a catastrophic forgetting phenomenon and sub-optimal performance. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new framework of Memory-Augmented Pre-trained Language Model (MAP), which augments the domain-specific PLM by a memory built from the frozen general PLM without losing the general knowledge. Specifically, we propose a new memory-augmented layer, and based on it, different augmentation strategies are explored to build memory and fusion memory into domain-specific PLM. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MAP on different domains (biomedical and computer science publications, news, and reviews) and different kinds (text classification, QA, NER) of tasks, and the extensive results show that the proposed MAP can achieve SOTA results on these tasks.

Complex question answering over knowledge base (Complex KBQA) is challenging because it requires various compositional reasoning capabilities, such as multi-hop inference, attribute comparison, set operation, etc. Existing benchmarks have some shortcomings that limit the development of Complex KBQA: 1) they only provide QA pairs without explicit reasoning processes; 2) questions are poor in diversity or scale. To this end, we introduce KQA Pro, a dataset for Complex KBQA including around 120K diverse natural language questions. We introduce a compositional and interpretable programming language KoPL to represent the reasoning process of complex questions. For each question, we provide the corresponding KoPL program and SPARQL query, so that KQA Pro can serve for both KBQA and semantic parsing tasks. Experimental results show that state-of-the-art KBQA methods cannot achieve promising results on KQA Pro as on current datasets, which suggests that KQA Pro is challenging and Complex KBQA requires further research efforts. We also treat KQA Pro as a diagnostic dataset for testing multiple reasoning skills, conduct a thorough evaluation of existing models and discuss further directions for Complex KBQA. Our codes and datasets can be obtained from https://github.com/shijx12/KQAPro_Baselines.

Program induction for answering complex questions over knowledge bases (KBs) aims to decompose a question into a multi-step program, whose execution against the KB produces the final answer. Learning to induce programs relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs for the given KB. However, for most KBs, the gold program annotations are usually lacking, making learning difficult. In this paper, we propose the approach of program transfer, which aims to leverage the valuable program annotations on the rich-resourced KBs as external supervision signals to aid program induction for the low-resourced KBs that lack program annotations. For program transfer, we design a novel two-stage parsing framework with an efficient ontology-guided pruning strategy. First, a sketch parser translates the question into a high-level program sketch, which is the composition of functions. Second, given the question and sketch, an argument parser searches the detailed arguments from the KB for functions. During the searching, we incorporate the KB ontology to prune the search space. The experiments on ComplexWebQuestions and WebQuestionSP show that our method outperforms SOTA methods significantly, demonstrating the effectiveness of program transfer and our framework. Our codes and datasets can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/ProgramTransfer.

Paraphrase generation reflects the ability to understand the meaning from the language surface form and rephrase it to other expressions. Recent paraphrase generation works have paid attention to unsupervised approaches based on Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to avoid heavy reliance on parallel data by utilizing PLMs’ generation ability. However, the generated pairs of existing unsupervised methods are usually weak either in semantic equivalence or expression diversity. In this paper, we present a novel unsupervised paraphrase generation framework called Paraphrase Machine. By employing multi-aspect equivalence constraints and multi-granularity diversifying mechanisms, Paraphrase Machine is able to achieve good semantic equivalence and expressive diversity, producing a high-quality unsupervised paraphrase dataset. Based on this dataset, we train a general paraphrase model, which can be directly applied to rewrite the input sentence of various domains without any fine-tuning, and achieves substantial gains of 9.1% and 3.3% absolutely in BLEU score over previous SOTA on Quora and MSCOCO. By further fine-tuning our model with domain-specific training sets, the improvement can be increased to even 18.0% and 4.6%. Most importantly, by applying it to language understanding and generation tasks under the low-resource setting, we demonstrate that our model can serve as a universal data augmentor to boost the few-shot performance (e.g., average 2.0% gain on GLUE).

Dependency parsing aims to extract syntactic dependency structure or semantic dependency structure for sentences. Existing methods for dependency parsing include transition-based method, graph-based method and sequence-to-sequence method. These methods obtain excellent performance and we notice them belong to labeling method. Therefore, it may be very valuable and interesting to explore the possibility of using generative method to implement dependency parsing. In this paper, we propose to achieve Dependency Parsing (DP) via Sequence Generation (SG) by utilizing only the pre-trained language model without any auxiliary structures. We first explore different serialization designing strategies for converting parsing structures into sequences. Then we design dependency units and concatenate these units into the sequence for DPSG.We verify the DPSG is capable of parsing on widely used DP benchmarks, i.e., PTB, UD2.2, SDP15 and SemEval16.In addition, we also investigate the astonishing low-resource applicability of DPSG, which includes unsupervised cross-domain conducted on CODT and few-shot cross-task conducted on SDP15.Our research demonstrates that sequence generation is one of the effective methods to achieve dependency parsing. Our codes are available now.

Wikipedia abstract generation aims to distill a Wikipedia abstract from web sources and has met significant success by adopting multi-document summarization techniques. However, previous works generally view the abstract as plain text, ignoring the fact that it is a description of a certain entity and can be decomposed into different topics. In this paper, we propose a two-stage model TWAG that guides the abstract generation with topical information. First, we detect the topic of each input paragraph with a classifier trained on existing Wikipedia articles to divide input documents into different topics. Then, we predict the topic distribution of each abstract sentence, and decode the sentence from topic-aware representations with a Pointer-Generator network. We evaluate our model on the WikiCatSum dataset, and the results show that TWAG outperforms various existing baselines and is capable of generating comprehensive abstracts.

Multi-hop Question Answering (QA) is a challenging task because it requires precise reasoning with entity relations at every step towards the answer. The relations can be represented in terms of labels in knowledge graph (e.g., spouse) or text in text corpus (e.g., they have been married for 26 years). Existing models usually infer the answer by predicting the sequential relation path or aggregating the hidden graph features. The former is hard to optimize, and the latter lacks interpretability. In this paper, we propose TransferNet, an effective and transparent model for multi-hop QA, which supports both label and text relations in a unified framework. TransferNet jumps across entities at multiple steps. At each step, it attends to different parts of the question, computes activated scores for relations, and then transfer the previous entity scores along activated relations in a differentiable way. We carry out extensive experiments on three datasets and demonstrate that TransferNet surpasses the state-of-the-art models by a large margin. In particular, on MetaQA, it achieves 100% accuracy in 2-hop and 3-hop questions. By qualitative analysis, we show that TransferNet has transparent and interpretable intermediate results.

Entity alignment aims at integrating complementary knowledge graphs (KGs) from different sources or languages, which may benefit many knowledge-driven applications. It is challenging due to the heterogeneity of KGs and limited seed alignments. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised entity alignment method by joint Knowledge Embedding model and Cross-Graph model (KECG). It can make better use of seed alignments to propagate over the entire graphs with KG-based constraints. Specifically, as for the knowledge embedding model, we utilize TransE to implicitly complete two KGs towards consistency and learn relational constraints between entities. As for the cross-graph model, we extend Graph Attention Network (GAT) with projection constraint to robustly encode graphs, and two KGs share the same GAT to transfer structural knowledge as well as to ignore unimportant neighbors for alignment via attention mechanism. Results on publicly available datasets as well as further analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of KECG. Our codes can be found in https: //github.com/THU-KEG/KECG.

To enhance the expression ability of distributional word representation learning model, many researchers tend to induce word senses through clustering, and learn multiple embedding vectors for each word, namely multi-prototype word embedding model. However, most related work ignores the relatedness among word senses which actually plays an important role. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to capture word sense relatedness in multi-prototype word embedding model. Particularly, we differentiate the original sense and extended senses of a word by introducing their global occurrence information and model their relatedness through the local textual context information. Based on the idea of fuzzy clustering, we introduce a random process to integrate these two types of senses and design two non-parametric methods for word sense induction. To make our model more scalable and efficient, we use an online joint learning framework extended from the Skip-gram model. The experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms both conventional single-prototype embedding models and other multi-prototype embedding models, and achieves more stable performance when trained on smaller data.