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

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

Study of Phase Stability in NiPt Systems

We have studied the problem of phase stability in NiPt alloy system. We have used the augmented space recursion based on the TB-LMTO as the method for studying the electronic structure of the alloys. In particular, we have used the relativistic generalization of our earlier technique. We note that, in order to predict the proper ground state structures and energetics, in addition to relativistic effects, we have to take into account charge transfer effects with precision.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in JPC

Constraints on R-parity violating supersymmetry from neutral meson mixing

Upper bounds at the weak scale are put on all $\lambda'_{ijk}\lambda'_{imn}$ type products of R-parity violating supersymmetry that may affect K-Kbar and B-Bbar mixing. We constrain all possible products, including some not considered before, using next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the mixing amplitudes. Constraints are obtained for both real and imaginary parts of the couplings. We also discuss briefly some correlated decay channels which should be investigated in future experiments.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, uses revtex. Constraints updated, and new constraints adde

Phase stability analysis in Fe-Pt and Co-Pt alloy systems: An augmented space study

We have studied the problem of phase stability in Fe-Pt and Co-Pt alloy systems. We have used the orbital peeling technique in the conjunction of augmented space recursion based on the tight binding linear orbital method as the method for the calculation of pair interaction energies. In particular, we have generalized our earlier technique to take into account of magnetic effects for the cases where the magnetic transition is higher than the order disorder chemical transition temperature as in the case of Co$_3$Pt. Our theoretical results obtained within this framework successfully reproduce the experimentally observed trends.Comment: 17 pages, 9 Figures. Accepted for publication in Journal of Physics : Condensed Matte