Multi-Hop Reasoning for Question Answering with Hyperbolic Representations

Simon Welz, Lucie Flek, Akbar Karimi


Abstract
Hyperbolic representations are effective in modeling knowledge graph data which is prevalently used to facilitate multi-hop reasoning. However, a rigorous and detailed comparison of the two spaces for this task is lacking. In this paper, through a simple integration of hyperbolic representations with an encoder-decoder model, we perform a controlled and comprehensive set of experiments to compare the capacity of hyperbolic space versus Euclidean space in multi-hop reasoning. Our results show that the former consistently outperforms the latter across a diverse set of datasets. In addition, through an ablation study, we show that a learnable curvature initialized with the delta hyperbolicity of the utilized data yields superior results to random initializations. Furthermore, our findings suggest that hyperbolic representations can be significantly more advantageous when the datasets exhibit a more hierarchical structure.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.908
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
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Findings | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
17667–17679
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.908/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Simon Welz, Lucie Flek, and Akbar Karimi. 2025. Multi-Hop Reasoning for Question Answering with Hyperbolic Representations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 17667–17679, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Hop Reasoning for Question Answering with Hyperbolic Representations (Welz et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.908.pdf