UniRPG: Unified Discrete Reasoning over Table and Text as Program Generation
Yongwei Zhou, Junwei Bao, Chaoqun Duan, Youzheng Wu, Xiaodong He, Tiejun Zhao
Abstract
Question answering requiring discrete reasoning, e.g., arithmetic computing, comparison, and counting, over knowledge is a challenging task.In this paper, we propose UniRPG, a semantic-parsing-based approach advanced in interpretability and scalability, to perform Unified discrete Reasoning over heterogeneous knowledge resources, i.e., table and text, as Program Generation. Concretely, UniRPG consists of a neural programmer and a symbolic program executor,where a program is the composition of a set of pre-defined general atomic and higher-order operations and arguments extracted from table and text.First, the programmer parses a question into a program by generating operations and copying arguments, and then, the executor derives answers from table and text based on the program.To alleviate the costly program annotation issue, we design a distant supervision approach for programmer learning, where pseudo programs are automatically constructed without annotated derivations.Extensive experiments on the TAT-QA dataset show that UniRPG achieves tremendous improvements and enhances interpretability and scalability compared with previous state-of-the-art methods, even without derivation annotation.Moreover, it achieves promising performance on the textual dataset DROP without derivation annotation.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.emnlp-main.508
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Editors:
- Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 7494–7507
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.508
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.508
- Cite (ACL):
- Yongwei Zhou, Junwei Bao, Chaoqun Duan, Youzheng Wu, Xiaodong He, and Tiejun Zhao. 2022. UniRPG: Unified Discrete Reasoning over Table and Text as Program Generation. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7494–7507, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- UniRPG: Unified Discrete Reasoning over Table and Text as Program Generation (Zhou et al., EMNLP 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2022.emnlp-main.508.pdf