Simple yet Effective Bridge Reasoning for Open-Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering
Wenhan Xiong, Mo Yu, Xiaoxiao Guo, Hong Wang, Shiyu Chang, Murray Campbell, William Yang Wang
Abstract
A key challenge of multi-hop question answering (QA) in the open-domain setting is to accurately retrieve the supporting passages from a large corpus. Existing work on open-domain QA typically relies on off-the-shelf information retrieval (IR) techniques to retrieve answer passages, i.e., the passages containing the groundtruth answers. However, IR-based approaches are insufficient for multi-hop questions, as the topic of the second or further hops is not explicitly covered by the question. To resolve this issue, we introduce a new subproblem of open-domain multi-hop QA, which aims to recognize the bridge (i.e., the anchor that links to the answer passage) from the context of a set of start passages with a reading comprehension model. This model, the bridge reasoner, is trained with a weakly supervised signal and produces the candidate answer passages for the passage reader to extract the answer. On the full-wiki HotpotQA benchmark, we significantly improve the baseline method by 14 point F1. Without using any memory inefficient contextual embeddings, our result is also competitive with the state-of-the-art that applies BERT in multiple modules.- Anthology ID:
- D19-5806
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Hong Kong, China
- Editors:
- Adam Fisch, Alon Talmor, Robin Jia, Minjoon Seo, Eunsol Choi, Danqi Chen
- Venue:
- WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 48–52
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/D19-5806
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/D19-5806
- Cite (ACL):
- Wenhan Xiong, Mo Yu, Xiaoxiao Guo, Hong Wang, Shiyu Chang, Murray Campbell, and William Yang Wang. 2019. Simple yet Effective Bridge Reasoning for Open-Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering, pages 48–52, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Simple yet Effective Bridge Reasoning for Open-Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering (Xiong et al., 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/D19-5806.pdf
- Data
- HotpotQA, SQuAD