3,063 research outputs found
Answering Complex Questions by Joining Multi-Document Evidence with Quasi Knowledge Graphs
Direct answering of questions that involve multiple entities and relations is a challenge for text-based QA. This problem is most pronounced when answers can be found only by joining evidence from multiple documents. Curated knowledge graphs (KGs) may yield good answers, but are limited by their inherent incompleteness and potential staleness. This paper presents QUEST, a method that can answer complex questions directly from textual sources on-the-fly, by computing similarity joins over partial results from different documents. Our method is completely unsupervised, avoiding training-data bottlenecks and being able to cope with rapidly evolving ad hoc topics and formulation style in user questions. QUEST builds a noisy quasi KG with node and edge weights, consisting of dynamically retrieved entity names and relational phrases. It augments this graph with types and semantic alignments, and computes the best answers by an algorithm for Group Steiner Trees. We evaluate QUEST on benchmarks of complex questions, and show that it substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines
TiFi: Taxonomy Induction for Fictional Domains [Extended version]
Taxonomies are important building blocks of structured knowledge bases, and their construction from text sources and Wikipedia has received much attention. In this paper we focus on the construction of taxonomies for fictional domains, using noisy category systems from fan wikis or text extraction as input. Such fictional domains are archetypes of entity universes that are poorly covered by Wikipedia, such as also enterprise-specific knowledge bases or highly specialized verticals. Our fiction-targeted approach, called TiFi, consists of three phases: (i) category cleaning, by identifying candidate categories that truly represent classes in the domain of interest, (ii) edge cleaning, by selecting subcategory relationships that correspond to class subsumption, and (iii) top-level construction, by mapping classes onto a subset of high-level WordNet categories. A comprehensive evaluation shows that TiFi is able to construct taxonomies for a diverse range of fictional domains such as Lord of the Rings, The Simpsons or Greek Mythology with very high precision and that it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for taxonomy induction by a substantial margin
Autoregressive Entity Retrieval
Entities are at the center of how we represent and aggregate knowledge. For
instance, Encyclopedias such as Wikipedia are structured by entities (e.g., one
per Wikipedia article). The ability to retrieve such entities given a query is
fundamental for knowledge-intensive tasks such as entity linking and
open-domain question answering. Current approaches can be understood as
classifiers among atomic labels, one for each entity. Their weight vectors are
dense entity representations produced by encoding entity meta information such
as their descriptions. This approach has several shortcomings: (i) context and
entity affinity is mainly captured through a vector dot product, potentially
missing fine-grained interactions; (ii) a large memory footprint is needed to
store dense representations when considering large entity sets; (iii) an
appropriately hard set of negative data has to be subsampled at training time.
In this work, we propose GENRE, the first system that retrieves entities by
generating their unique names, left to right, token-by-token in an
autoregressive fashion. This mitigates the aforementioned technical issues
since: (i) the autoregressive formulation directly captures relations between
context and entity name, effectively cross encoding both; (ii) the memory
footprint is greatly reduced because the parameters of our encoder-decoder
architecture scale with vocabulary size, not entity count; (iii) the softmax
loss is computed without subsampling negative data. We experiment with more
than 20 datasets on entity disambiguation, end-to-end entity linking and
document retrieval tasks, achieving new state-of-the-art or very competitive
results while using a tiny fraction of the memory footprint of competing
systems. Finally, we demonstrate that new entities can be added by simply
specifying their names. Code and pre-trained models at
https://github.com/facebookresearch/GENRE.Comment: Accepted (spotlight) at International Conference on Learning
Representations (ICLR) 2021. Code at
https://github.com/facebookresearch/GENRE. 20 pages, 9 figures, 8 table
Entity-Oriented Search
This open access book covers all facets of entity-oriented search—where “search” can be interpreted in the broadest sense of information access—from a unified point of view, and provides a coherent and comprehensive overview of the state of the art. It represents the first synthesis of research in this broad and rapidly developing area. Selected topics are discussed in-depth, the goal being to establish fundamental techniques and methods as a basis for future research and development. Additional topics are treated at a survey level only, containing numerous pointers to the relevant literature. A roadmap for future research, based on open issues and challenges identified along the way, rounds out the book. The book is divided into three main parts, sandwiched between introductory and concluding chapters. The first two chapters introduce readers to the basic concepts, provide an overview of entity-oriented search tasks, and present the various types and sources of data that will be used throughout the book. Part I deals with the core task of entity ranking: given a textual query, possibly enriched with additional elements or structural hints, return a ranked list of entities. This core task is examined in a number of different variants, using both structured and unstructured data collections, and numerous query formulations. In turn, Part II is devoted to the role of entities in bridging unstructured and structured data. Part III explores how entities can enable search engines to understand the concepts, meaning, and intent behind the query that the user enters into the search box, and how they can provide rich and focused responses (as opposed to merely a list of documents)—a process known as semantic search. The final chapter concludes the book by discussing the limitations of current approaches, and suggesting directions for future research. Researchers and graduate students are the primary target audience of this book. A general background in information retrieval is sufficient to follow the material, including an understanding of basic probability and statistics concepts as well as a basic knowledge of machine learning concepts and supervised learning algorithms
Improving Zero-shot Reader by Reducing Distractions from Irrelevant Documents in Open-Domain Question Answering
Large language models (LLMs) enable zero-shot approaches in open-domain
question answering (ODQA), yet with limited advancements as the reader is
compared to the retriever. This study aims at the feasibility of a zero-shot
reader that addresses the challenges of computational cost and the need for
labeled data. We find that LLMs are distracted due to irrelevant documents in
the retrieved set and the overconfidence of the generated answers when they are
exploited as zero-shot readers. To tackle these problems, we mitigate the
impact of such documents via Distraction-aware Answer Selection (DAS) with a
negation-based instruction and score adjustment for proper answer selection.
Experimental results show that our approach successfully handles distraction
across diverse scenarios, enhancing the performance of zero-shot readers.
Furthermore, unlike supervised readers struggling with unseen data, zero-shot
readers demonstrate outstanding transferability without any training.Comment: Findings of EMNLP 2023 Camera Read
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