We propose a neural network-based approach to automatically learn and classify natural language questions into its corresponding template using recursive neural networks. An obvious advantage of using neural networks is the elimination of the need for laborious feature engineering that can be cumbersome and error-prone. The input question is encoded into a vector representation. The model is trained and evaluated on the LC-QuAD dataset (Large-scale Complex Question Answering Dataset). The LC-QuAD queries are annotated based on 38 unique templates that the model attempts to classify. The resulting model is evaluated against both the LC-QuAD dataset and the 7th Question Answering Over Linked Data (QALD-7) dataset. The recursive neural network achieves template classification accuracy of 0.828 on the LC-QuAD dataset and an accuracy of 0.618 on the QALD-7 dataset. When the top-2 most likely templates were considered the model achieves an accuracy of 0.945 on the LC-QuAD dataset and 0.786 on the QALD-7 dataset. After slot filling, the overall system achieves a macro F-score 0.419 on the LC-QuAD dataset and a macro F-score of 0.417 on the QALD-7 dataset.
Question Answering (QA) is in increasing demand as the amount of information available online and the desire for quick access to this content grows. A common approach to QA has been to fine-tune a pretrained language model on a task-specific labeled dataset. This paradigm, however, relies on scarce, and costly to obtain, large-scale human-labeled data. We propose an unsupervised approach to training QA models with generated pseudo-training data. We show that generating questions for QA training by applying a simple template on a related, retrieved sentence rather than the original context sent…
Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）
When answering a question, people often draw upon their rich world knowledge in addition to the particular context. While recent works retrieve supporting facts/evidence from commonsense knowledge bases to supply additional information to each question, there is still ample opportunity to advance it on the quality of the evidence. It is crucial since the quality of the evidence is the key to answering commonsense questions, and even determines the upper bound on the QA systems performance. In this paper, we propose a recursive erasure memory network (REM-Net) to cope with the quality improveme…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
This paper introduces our systems for the first two subtasks of SemEval Task4: Commonsense Validation and Explanation. To clarify the intention for judgment and inject contrastive information for selection, we propose the input reconstruction strategy with prompt templates. Specifically, we formalize the subtasks into the multiple-choice question answering format and construct the input with the prompt templates, then, the final prediction of question answering is considered as the result of subtasks. Experimental results show that our approaches achieve significant performance compared with t…
Question answering (QA) has become a popular way for humans to access billion-scale knowledge bases. Unlike web search, QA over a knowledge base gives out accurate and concise results, provided that natural language questions can be understood and mapped precisely to structured queries over the knowledge base. The challenge, however, is that a human can ask one question in many different ways. Previous approaches have natural limits due to their representations: rule based approaches only understand a small set of "canned" questions, while keyword based or synonym based approaches cannot fully…
Table Question Answering (TQA) is an important but under-explored task. Most of the existing QA datasets are in unstructured text format and only few of them use tables as the context. To the best of our knowledge, none of TQA datasets exist in the biomedical domain where tables are frequently used to present information. In this paper, we first curate a table question answering dataset, BioTABQA, using 22 templates and the context from a biomedical textbook on differential diagnosis. BioTABQA can not only be used to teach a model how to answer questions from tables but also evaluate how a mod…
The goal of Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA) is to find answers for natural language questions over a knowledge graph. Recent KGQA approaches adopt a neural machine translation (NMT) approach, where the natural language question is translated into a structured query language. However, NMT suffers from the out-of-vocabulary problem, where terms in a question may not have been seen during training, impeding their translation. This issue is particularly problematic for the millions of entities that large knowledge graphs describe. We rather propose a KGQA approach that delegates th…
Information Extraction (IE) researchers are mapping tasks to Question Answering (QA) in order to leverage existing large QA resources, and thereby improve data efficiency. Especially in template extraction (TE), mapping an ontology to a set of questions can be more time-efficient than collecting labeled examples. We ask whether end users of TE systems can design these questions, and whether it is beneficial to involve an NLP practitioner in the process. We compare questions to other ways of phrasing natural language prompts for TE. We propose a novel model to perform TE with prompts, and find …
Robust Bias Evaluation with FilBBQ: A Filipino Bias Benchmark for Question-Answering Language Models
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学计算机科学学院）；Department of Information Systems and Computer Science, Ateneo de Manila University（马尼拉大学信息系统与计算机科学系）
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Embedding-based methods are popular for Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA), but few current models have numerical reasoning skills and thus struggle to answer ordinal constrained questions. This paper proposes a new embedding-based KBQA framework which particularly takes numerical reasoning into account. We present NumericalTransformer on top of NSM, a state-of-the-art embedding-based KBQA model, to create NT-NSM. To enable better training, we propose two pre-training tasks with explicit numerical-oriented loss functions on two generated training datasets and a template-based data augmen…
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
In this paper, we introduce a new dataset consisting of 360,001 focused natural language descriptions for 10,738 images. This dataset, the Visual Madlibs dataset, is collected using automatically produced fill-in-the-blank templates designed to gather targeted descriptions about: people and objects, their appearances, activities, and interactions, as well as inferences about the general scene or its broader context. We provide several analyses of the Visual Madlibs dataset and demonstrate its applicability to two new description generation tasks: focused description generation, and multiple-ch…
MedRLM: Recursive Multimodal Health Intelligence for Long-Context Clinical Reasoning, Sensor-Guided Screening, Evidence-Grounded Decision Support, and Community-to-Tertiary Referral Optimization
School of Information, Computer；Communication Technology Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University Pathum Thani, Thailand 1
GG-BBQ: German Gender Bias Benchmark for Question Answering
Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems（弗劳恩霍夫智能分析与信息系统研究所）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔机器学习与人工智能研究所）；Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences（波恩-莱茵-锡格应用科学大学）
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
Question Answering (QA) over Knowledge Base (KB) aims to automatically answer natural language questions via well-structured relation information between entities stored in knowledge bases. In order to make KBQA more applicable in actual scenarios, researchers have shifted their attention from simple questions to complex questions, which require more KB triples and constraint inference. In this paper, we introduce the recent advances in complex QA. Besides traditional methods relying on templates and rules, the research is categorized into a taxonomy that contains two main branches, namely Inf…
InteractiveIE: Towards Assessing the Strength of Human-AI Collaboration in Improving the Performance of Information Extraction
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Amazon（亚马逊公司）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）；John Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学）；University of Maryland School of Law（马里兰大学法学院）
Releasing the CRaQAn (Coreference Resolution in Question-Answering): An open-source dataset and dataset creation methodology using instruction-following models
Zero-Shot Relation Extraction (ZRE) is the task of Relation Extraction where the training and test sets have no shared relation types. This very challenging domain is a good test of a model's ability to generalize. Previous approaches to ZRE reframed relation extraction as Question Answering (QA), allowing for the use of pre-trained QA models. However, this method required manually creating gold question templates for each new relation. Here, we do away with these gold templates and instead learn a model that can generate questions for unseen relations. Our technique can successfully translate…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Answering compositional questions requiring multi-step reasoning is challenging. We introduce an end-to-end differentiable model for interpreting questions about a knowledge graph (KG), which is inspired by formal approaches to semantics. Each span of text is represented by a denotation in a KG and a vector that captures ungrounded aspects of meaning. Learned composition modules recursively combine constituent spans, culminating in a grounding for the complete sentence which answers the question. For example, to interpret "not green", the model represents "green" as a set of KG entities and "n…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Wuhan University of Science and Technology（武汉科技大学）
Natural language question answering over knowledge graphs is an important and interesting task as it enables common users to gain accurate answers in an easy and intuitive manner. However, it remains a challenge to bridge the gap between unstructured questions and structured knowledge graphs. To address the problem, a natural discipline is building a structured query to represent the input question. Searching the structured query over the knowledge graph can produce answers to the question. Distinct from the existing methods that are based on semantic parsing or templates, we propose an effect…
York University（约克大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Salesforce Research（赛富时研究院）
Charts are very popular for analyzing data. When exploring charts, people often ask a variety of complex reasoning questions that involve several logical and arithmetic operations. They also commonly refer to visual features of a chart in their questions. However, most existing datasets do not focus on such complex reasoning questions as their questions are template-based and answers come from a fixed-vocabulary. In this work, we present a large-scale benchmark covering 9.6K human-written questions as well as 23.1K questions generated from human-written chart summaries. To address the unique c…
The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Event argument extraction has long been studied as a sequential prediction problem with extractive-based methods, tackling each argument in isolation. Although recent work proposes generation-based methods to capture cross-argument dependency, they require generating and post-processing a complicated target sequence (template). Motivated by these observations and recent pretrained language models' capabilities of learning from demonstrations. We propose a retrieval-augmented generative QA model (R-GQA) for event argument extraction. It retrieves the most similar QA pair and augments it as prom…
Minzu University of China（中央民族大学）；National Language Resource and Monitoring Research Center（国家语言资源监测研究中心）
Person knowledge extraction is the foundation of the Tibetan knowledge graph construction, which provides support for Tibetan question answering system, information retrieval, information extraction and other researches, and promotes national unity and social stability. This paper proposes a SVM and template based approach to Tibetan person knowledge extraction. Through constructing the training corpus, we build the templates based the shallow parsing analysis of Tibetan syntactic, semantic features and verbs. Using the training corpus, we design a hierarchical SVM classifier to realize the en…
We propose a new attention model for video question answering. The main idea of the attention models is to locate on the most informative parts of the visual data. The attention mechanisms are quite popular these days. However, most existing visual attention mechanisms regard the question as a whole. They ignore the word-level semantics where each word can have different attentions and some words need no attention. Neither do they consider the semantic structure of the sentences. Although the Extended Soft Attention (E-SA) model for video question answering leverages the word-level attention, …
Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Pacific Northwest National Laboratory（太平洋西北国家实验室）
Question Answering (QA) in clinical notes has gained a lot of attention in the past few years. Existing machine reading comprehension approaches in clinical domain can only handle questions about a single block of clinical texts and fail to retrieve information about multiple patients and their clinical notes. To handle more complex questions, we aim at creating knowledge base from clinical notes to link different patients and clinical notes, and performing knowledge base question answering (KBQA). Based on the expert annotations available in the n2c2 dataset, we first created the ClinicalKBQA…
University of Dayton（代顿大学）；RWTH Aachen（亚琛工业大学）；Zerotha Research（泽罗萨研究中心）；Cerence GmbH（塞伦斯有限责任公司）
In the era of Big Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering (QA) systems have reached a milestone in their performance and feasibility. However, their applicability, particularly in specific domains such as the biomedical domain, has not gained wide acceptance due to their "black box" nature, which hinders transparency, fairness, and accountability of QA systems. Therefore, users are unable to understand how and why particular questions have been answered, whereas some others fail. To address this challenge, in this paper, we develop an automatic approach for generating explanations during various …
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）
Information seeking is an essential step for open-domain question answering to efficiently gather evidence from a large corpus. Recently, iterative approaches have been proven to be effective for complex questions, by recursively retrieving new evidence at each step. However, almost all existing iterative approaches use predefined strategies, either applying the same retrieval function multiple times or fixing the order of different retrieval functions, which cannot fulfill the diverse requirements of various questions. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive information-seeking strategy fo…
Research Center for Social Computing and Information Retrieval（社会计算与信息检索研究中心）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Existing KG-augmented models for commonsense question answering primarily focus on designing elaborate Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to model knowledge graphs (KGs). However, they ignore (i) the effectively fusing and reasoning over question context representations and the KG representations, and (ii) automatically selecting relevant nodes from the noisy KGs during reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel model, JointLK, which solves the above limitations through the joint reasoning of LM and GNN and the dynamic KGs pruning mechanism. Specifically, JointLK performs joint reasoning between L…
Our goal is a question-answering (QA) system that can show how its answers are implied by its own internal beliefs via a systematic chain of reasoning. Such a capability would allow better understanding of why a model produced the answer it did. Our approach is to recursively combine a trained backward-chaining model, capable of generating a set of premises entailing an answer hypothesis, with a verifier that checks that the model itself believes those premises (and the entailment itself) through self-querying. To our knowledge, this is the first system to generate multistep chains that are bo…
Spatial understanding is a fundamental problem with wide-reaching real-world applications. The representation of spatial knowledge is often modeled with spatial templates, i.e., regions of acceptability of two objects under an explicit spatial relationship (e.g., "on", "below", etc.). In contrast with prior work that restricts spatial templates to explicit spatial prepositions (e.g., "glass on table"), here we extend this concept to implicit spatial language, i.e., those relationships (generally actions) for which the spatial arrangement of the objects is only implicitly implied (e.g., "man ri…
Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；Trinity College Dublin（都柏林大学三一学院）
Question Generation (QG) is the task of generating a plausible question for a given <passage, answer> pair. Template-based QG uses linguistically-informed heuristics to transform declarative sentences into interrogatives, whereas supervised QG uses existing Question Answering (QA) datasets to train a system to generate a question given a passage and an answer. A disadvantage of the heuristic approach is that the generated questions are heavily tied to their declarative counterparts. A disadvantage of the supervised approach is that they are heavily tied to the domain/language of the QA dataset…
Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) facilitates information access by leveraging structured data without requiring formal query language expertise from the user. Instead, users can express their information needs by simply asking their questions in natural language (NL). Datasets used to train KGQA models that would provide such a service are expensive to construct, both in terms of expert and crowdsourced labor. Typically, crowdsourced labor is used to improve template-based pseudo-natural questions generated from formal queries. However, the resulting datasets often fall short of repre…
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；The Fin AI（金融人工智能公司）；FMI, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”（索非亚大学“圣克莱门特·奥赫里德斯基”金融数学与信息学系）；INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”（索非亚大学“圣克莱门特·奥赫里德斯基”信息技术与自动化研究所）；University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Mila, Quebec AI Institute（魁北克人工智能研究所）；Meiji Gakuin University（明治学院大学）
Domain Fine-Tuning vs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Medical Multiple-Choice Question Answering: A Controlled Comparison at the 4B-Parameter Scale
Department of Information Science and Applied Artificial Intelligence（信息科学与应用人工智能系）
Exploring the Impact of Table-to-Text Methods on Augmenting LLM-based Question Answering with Domain Hybrid Data
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学计算机科学系）
EHRNote-ChatQA: A Benchmark for Evidence-Grounded Multi-Turn Clinical Question Answering over Longitudinal Discharge Summaries
KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Seoul National University Bundang Hospital（首尔大学盆唐医院）；SAIHST, Sungkyunkwan University（成均馆大学）；Yonsei University College of Medicine（延世大学医学院）；Gangnam Severance Hospital（江南塞弗伦斯医院）；Severance Hospital（塞弗伦斯医院）；Seoul Medical Center（首尔医疗中心）；Seoul National University Hospital（首尔大学医院）；National Cancer Center（国立癌症中心）；Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai（西奈山伊坎医学院）；Samsung Medical Center（三星医疗中心）
SEAL: Self-Evolving Agentic Learning for Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs
Institute of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, China Telecom Research Institute（大数据与人工智能研究院，中国电信研究院）；Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（王宣计算机技术研究所，北京大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, China University of Geosciences (Beijing)（人工智能学院，中国地质大学（北京））；Center for Cognition and Neuroergonomics, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University（认知与神经工效学中心，认知神经科学与学习国家重点实验室，北京师范大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Future Networks, Beijing Normal University（人工智能与未来网络研究院，北京师范大学）
