Multi-hop Inference for Sentence-level TextGraphs: How Challenging is Meaningfully Combining Information for Science Question Answering?

Peter Jansen


Abstract
Question Answering for complex questions is often modelled as a graph construction or traversal task, where a solver must build or traverse a graph of facts that answer and explain a given question. This “multi-hop” inference has been shown to be extremely challenging, with few models able to aggregate more than two facts before being overwhelmed by “semantic drift”, or the tendency for long chains of facts to quickly drift off topic. This is a major barrier to current inference models, as even elementary science questions require an average of 4 to 6 facts to answer and explain. In this work we empirically characterize the difficulty of building or traversing a graph of sentences connected by lexical overlap, by evaluating chance sentence aggregation quality through 9,784 manually-annotated judgements across knowledge graphs built from three free-text corpora (including study guides and Simple Wikipedia). We demonstrate semantic drift tends to be high and aggregation quality low, at between 0.04 and 3, and highlight scenarios that maximize the likelihood of meaningfully combining information.
Anthology ID:
W18-1703
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-12)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Editors:
Goran Glavaš, Swapna Somasundaran, Martin Riedl, Eduard Hovy
Venue:
TextGraphs
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12–17
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-1703
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-1703
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peter Jansen. 2018. Multi-hop Inference for Sentence-level TextGraphs: How Challenging is Meaningfully Combining Information for Science Question Answering?. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-12), pages 12–17, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-hop Inference for Sentence-level TextGraphs: How Challenging is Meaningfully Combining Information for Science Question Answering? (Jansen, TextGraphs 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-1703.pdf