Work

Knowledge Guided Text Retrieval and Reading for Open Domain Question Answering

Year: 2019
Type: preprint
Abstract: We introduce an approach for open-domain question answering (QA) that retrieves and reads a passage graph, where vertices are passages of text and edges represent relationships that are derived from an external knowledge base or co-occurrence in the same article. Our goals are to boost coverage by using knowledge-guided retrieval to find more relevant passages than text-matching methods, and to improve accuracy by allowing for better knowledge-guided fusion of information across related passages. Our graph retrieval method expands a set of seed keyword-retrieved passages by traversing the graph structure of the knowledge base. Our reader extends a BERT-based architecture and updates passage representations by propagating information from related passages and their relations, instead of reading each passage in isolation. Experiments on three open-domain QA datasets, WebQuestions, Natural Questions and TriviaQA, show improved performance over non-graph baselines by 2-11% absolute. Our approach also matches or exceeds the state-of-the-art in every case, without using an expensive end-to-end training regime.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2989312920
Cites: 40
Cited by: 76
Related to: 10