Yu Feng


2021

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A Pretraining Numerical Reasoning Model for Ordinal Constrained Question Answering on Knowledge Base
Yu Feng | Jing Zhang | Gaole He | Wayne Xin Zhao | Lemao Liu | Quan Liu | Cuiping Li | Hong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) is to answer natural language questions posed over knowledge bases (KBs). This paper targets at empowering the IR-based KBQA models with the ability of numerical reasoning for answering ordinal constrained questions. A major challenge is the lack of explicit annotations about numerical properties. To address this challenge, we propose a pretraining numerical reasoning model consisting of NumGNN and NumTransformer, guided by explicit self-supervision signals. The two modules are pretrained to encode the magnitude and ordinal properties of numbers respectively and can serve as model-agnostic plugins for any IR-based KBQA model to enhance its numerical reasoning ability. Extensive experiments on two KBQA benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our method to enhance the numerical reasoning ability for IR-based KBQA models.