Open Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering (ODMHQA) plays a crucial role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by aiming to answer complex questions through multi-step reasoning over retrieved information from external knowledge sources. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in solving ODMHQA owing to their capabilities including planning, reasoning, and utilizing tools. However, LLMs may generate off-topic answers when attempting to solve ODMHQA, namely the generated answers are irrelevant to the original questions. This issue of off-topic answers accounts for approximately one-third of incorrect answers, yet remains underexplored despite its significance. To alleviate this issue, we propose the Discriminate→Re-Compose→Re- Solve→Re-Decompose (Dr3) mechanism. Specifically, the Discriminator leverages the intrinsic capabilities of LLMs to judge whether the generated answers are off-topic. In cases where an off-topic answer is detected, the Corrector performs step-wise revisions along the reversed reasoning chain (Re-Compose→Re-Solve→Re-Decompose) until the final answer becomes on-topic. Experimental results on the HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA datasets demonstrate that our Dr3 mechanism considerably reduces the occurrence of off-topic answers in ODMHQA by nearly 13%, improving the performance in Exact Match (EM) by nearly 3% compared to the baseline method without the Dr3 mechanism.

This paper describes the submission systems of Alibaba for WMT18 shared news translation task. We participated in 5 translation directions including English ↔ Russian, English ↔ Turkish in both directions and English → Chinese. Our systems are based on Google’s Transformer model architecture, into which we integrated the most recent features from the academic research. We also employed most techniques that have been proven effective during the past WMT years, such as BPE, back translation, data selection, model ensembling and reranking, at industrial scale. For some morphologically-rich languages, we also incorporated linguistic knowledge into our neural network. For the translation tasks in which we have participated, our resulting systems achieved the best case sensitive BLEU score in all 5 directions. Notably, our English → Russian system outperformed the second reranked system by 5 BLEU score.