603 research outputs found
Question Answering on Knowledge Bases and Text using Universal Schema and Memory Networks
Existing question answering methods infer answers either from a knowledge
base or from raw text. While knowledge base (KB) methods are good at answering
compositional questions, their performance is often affected by the
incompleteness of the KB. Au contraire, web text contains millions of facts
that are absent in the KB, however in an unstructured form. {\it Universal
schema} can support reasoning on the union of both structured KBs and
unstructured text by aligning them in a common embedded space. In this paper we
extend universal schema to natural language question answering, employing
\emph{memory networks} to attend to the large body of facts in the combination
of text and KB. Our models can be trained in an end-to-end fashion on
question-answer pairs. Evaluation results on \spades fill-in-the-blank question
answering dataset show that exploiting universal schema for question answering
is better than using either a KB or text alone. This model also outperforms the
current state-of-the-art by 8.5 points.\footnote{Code and data available
in \url{https://rajarshd.github.io/TextKBQA}}Comment: ACL 2017 (short
Neural Architecture for Question Answering Using a Knowledge Graph and Web Corpus
In Web search, entity-seeking queries often trigger a special Question
Answering (QA) system. It may use a parser to interpret the question to a
structured query, execute that on a knowledge graph (KG), and return direct
entity responses. QA systems based on precise parsing tend to be brittle: minor
syntax variations may dramatically change the response. Moreover, KG coverage
is patchy. At the other extreme, a large corpus may provide broader coverage,
but in an unstructured, unreliable form. We present AQQUCN, a QA system that
gracefully combines KG and corpus evidence. AQQUCN accepts a broad spectrum of
query syntax, between well-formed questions to short `telegraphic' keyword
sequences. In the face of inherent query ambiguities, AQQUCN aggregates signals
from KGs and large corpora to directly rank KG entities, rather than commit to
one semantic interpretation of the query. AQQUCN models the ideal
interpretation as an unobservable or latent variable. Interpretations and
candidate entity responses are scored as pairs, by combining signals from
multiple convolutional networks that operate collectively on the query, KG and
corpus. On four public query workloads, amounting to over 8,000 queries with
diverse query syntax, we see 5--16% absolute improvement in mean average
precision (MAP), compared to the entity ranking performance of recent systems.
Our system is also competitive at entity set retrieval, almost doubling F1
scores for challenging short queries.Comment: Accepted to Information Retrieval Journa
TEQUILA: Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Bases
Question answering over knowledge bases (KB-QA) poses challenges in handling complex questions that need to be decomposed into sub-questions. An important case, addressed here, is that of temporal questions, where cues for temporal relations need to be discovered and handled. We present TEQUILA, an enabler method for temporal QA that can run on top of any KB-QA engine. TEQUILA has four stages. It detects if a question has temporal intent. It decomposes and rewrites the question into non-temporal sub-questions and temporal constraints. Answers to sub-questions are then retrieved from the underlying KB-QA engine. Finally, TEQUILA uses constraint reasoning on temporal intervals to compute final answers to the full question. Comparisons against state-of-the-art baselines show the viability of our method
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
Improved Neural Relation Detection for Knowledge Base Question Answering
Relation detection is a core component for many NLP applications including
Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA). In this paper, we propose a
hierarchical recurrent neural network enhanced by residual learning that
detects KB relations given an input question. Our method uses deep residual
bidirectional LSTMs to compare questions and relation names via different
hierarchies of abstraction. Additionally, we propose a simple KBQA system that
integrates entity linking and our proposed relation detector to enable one
enhance another. Experimental results evidence that our approach achieves not
only outstanding relation detection performance, but more importantly, it helps
our KBQA system to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy for both single-relation
(SimpleQuestions) and multi-relation (WebQSP) QA benchmarks.Comment: Accepted by ACL 2017 (updated for camera-ready
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