Large-Scale Relation Learning for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases with Pre-trained Language Models

Yuanmeng Yan, Rumei Li, Sirui Wang, Hongzhi Zhang, Zan Daoguang, Fuzheng Zhang, Wei Wu, Weiran Xu


Abstract
The key challenge of question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) is the inconsistency between the natural language questions and the reasoning paths in the knowledge base (KB). Recent graph-based KBQA methods are good at grasping the topological structure of the graph but often ignore the textual information carried by the nodes and edges. Meanwhile, pre-trained language models learn massive open-world knowledge from the large corpus, but it is in the natural language form and not structured. To bridge the gap between the natural language and the structured KB, we propose three relation learning tasks for BERT-based KBQA, including relation extraction, relation matching, and relation reasoning. By relation-augmented training, the model learns to align the natural language expressions to the relations in the KB as well as reason over the missing connections in the KB. Experiments on WebQSP show that our method consistently outperforms other baselines, especially when the KB is incomplete.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.296
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3653–3660
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.296
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.296
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanmeng Yan, Rumei Li, Sirui Wang, Hongzhi Zhang, Zan Daoguang, Fuzheng Zhang, Wei Wu, and Weiran Xu. 2021. Large-Scale Relation Learning for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases with Pre-trained Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3653–3660, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large-Scale Relation Learning for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases with Pre-trained Language Models (Yan et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.emnlp-main.296.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.emnlp-main.296.mp4
Code
 yym6472/kbqarelationlearning
Data
FewRel