A STEP towards Interpretable Multi-Hop Reasoning: Bridge Phrase Identification and Query Expansion

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We propose an unsupervised method for the identification of bridge phrases in multi-hop question answering (QA). Our method constructs a graph of noun phrases from the question and the available context, and applies the Steiner tree algorithm to identify the minimal sub-graph that connects all question phrases. Nodes in the sub-graph that bridge loosely-connected or disjoint subsets of question phrases due to low-strength semantic relations are extracted as bridge phrases. The identified bridge phrases are then used to expand the query based on the initial question, helping in increasing the relevance of evidence that has little lexical overlap or semantic relation with the question. Through an evaluation on HotpotQA(Yang et al., 2018), a popular dataset for multi-hop QA, we show that our method yields: (a) improved evidence retrieval, (b) improved QA performance when using the retrieved sentences; and (c) effective and faithful explanations when answers are provided.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2022 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC 2022
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Frederic Bechet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages4552-4560
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9791095546726
StatePublished - 2022
Event13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC 2022 - Marseille, France
Duration: Jun 20 2022Jun 25 2022

Publication series

Name2022 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC 2022

Conference

Conference13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC 2022
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityMarseille
Period6/20/226/25/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Library and Information Sciences
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Education

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