Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases

Rajarshi Das, Manzil Zaheer, Dung Thai, Ameya Godbole, Ethan Perez, Jay Yoon Lee, Lizhen Tan, Lazaros Polymenakos, Andrew McCallum


Abstract
It is often challenging to solve a complex problem from scratch, but much easier if we can access other similar problems with their solutions — a paradigm known as case-based reasoning (CBR). We propose a neuro-symbolic CBR approach (CBR-KBQA) for question answering over large knowledge bases. CBR-KBQA consists of a nonparametric memory that stores cases (question and logical forms) and a parametric model that can generate a logical form for a new question by retrieving cases that are relevant to it. On several KBQA datasets that contain complex questions, CBR-KBQA achieves competitive performance. For example, on the CWQ dataset, CBR-KBQA outperforms the current state of the art by 11% on accuracy. Furthermore, we show that CBR-KBQA is capable of using new cases without any further training: by incorporating a few human-labeled examples in the case memory, CBR-KBQA is able to successfully generate logical forms containing unseen KB entities as well as relations.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.755
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9594–9611
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.755
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.755
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rajarshi Das, Manzil Zaheer, Dung Thai, Ameya Godbole, Ethan Perez, Jay Yoon Lee, Lizhen Tan, Lazaros Polymenakos, and Andrew McCallum. 2021. Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9594–9611, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases (Das et al., EMNLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2021.emnlp-main.755.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2021.emnlp-main.755.mp4
Data
CFQComplexWebQuestionsSimpleQuestionsWebQuestionsWebQuestionsSP