Look before you Hop: Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs Using Judicious Context Expansion

Fact-centric information needs are rarely one-shot; users typically ask follow-up questions to explore a topic. In such a conversational setting, the user's inputs are often incomplete, with entities or predicates left out, and ungrammatical phrases. This poses a huge challenge to question answering (QA) systems that typically rely on cues in full-fledged interrogative sentences. As a solution, we develop CONVEX: an unsupervised method that can answer incomplete questions over a knowledge graph (KG) by maintaining conversation context using entities and predicates seen so far and automatically inferring missing or ambiguous pieces for follow-up questions. The core of our method is a graph exploration algorithm that judiciously expands a frontier to find candidate answers for the current question. To evaluate CONVEX, we release ConvQuestions, a crowdsourced benchmark with 11,200 distinct conversations from five different domains. We show that CONVEX: (i) adds conversational support to any stand-alone QA system, and (ii) outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and question completion strategies

Querying knowledge graphs in natural language.

Knowledge graphs are a powerful concept for querying large amounts of data. These knowledge graphs are typically enormous and are often not easily accessible to end-users because they require specialized knowledge in query languages such as SPARQL. Moreover, end-users need a deep understanding of the structure of the underlying data models often based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF). This drawback has led to the development of Question-Answering (QA) systems that enable end-users to express their information needs in natural language. While existing systems simplify user access, there is still room for improvement in the accuracy of these systems. In this paper we propose a new QA system for translating natural language questions into SPARQL queries. The key idea is to break up the translation process into 5 smaller, more manageable sub-tasks and use ensemble machine learning methods as well as Tree-LSTM-based neural network models to automatically learn and translate a natural language question into a SPARQL query. The performance of our proposed QA system is empirically evaluated using the two renowned benchmarks-the 7th Question Answering over Linked Data Challenge (QALD-7) and the Large-Scale Complex Question Answering Dataset (LC-QuAD). Experimental results show that our QA system outperforms the state-of-art systems by 15% on the QALD-7 dataset and by 48% on the LC-QuAD dataset, respectively. In addition, we make our source code available

Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering: A Survey

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) aims to answer a question over a knowledge base (KB). Early studies mainly focused on answering simple questions over KBs and achieved great success. However, their performance on complex questions is still far from satisfactory. Therefore, in recent years, researchers propose a large number of novel methods, which looked into the challenges of answering complex questions. In this survey, we review recent advances on KBQA with the focus on solving complex questions, which usually contain multiple subjects, express compound relations, or involve numerical operations. In detail, we begin with introducing the complex KBQA task and relevant background. Then, we describe benchmark datasets for complex KBQA task and introduce the construction process of these datasets. Next, we present two mainstream categories of methods for complex KBQA, namely semantic parsing-based (SP-based) methods and information retrieval-based (IR-based) methods. Specifically, we illustrate their procedures with flow designs and discuss their major differences and similarities. After that, we summarize the challenges that these two categories of methods encounter when answering complex questions, and explicate advanced solutions and techniques used in existing work. Finally, we conclude and discuss several promising directions related to complex KBQA for future research.Comment: 20 pages, 4 tables, 7 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2105.1164