Skip to main content

How Question Generation Can Help Question Answering over Knowledge Base

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11838))

Abstract

We study how to improve the performance of Question Answering over Knowledge Base (KBQA) by utilizing the factoid Question Generation (QG) in this paper. The task of question generation (QG) is to generate a corresponding natural language question given the input answer, while question answering (QA) is a reverse task to find a proper answer given the question. For the KBQA task, the answer could be regarded as a fact containing a predicate and two entities from the knowledge base. Training an effective KBQA system needs a lot of labeled data which are hard to acquire. And a trained KBQA system still performs poor when answering the questions corresponding with unseen predicates in the training process. To solve these challenges, we propose a unified framework to combine the QG and QA with the help of knowledge base and text corpus. The models of QA and QG are first trained jointly on the gold dataset, then the QA model is fine tuned by utilizing a supplemental dataset constructed by the QG model with the help of text evidence. We conduct experiments on two datasets SimpleQuestions and WebQSP with the Freebase knowledge base. Empirical results show that our framework improves the performance of KBQA and performs comparably with or even better than the state-of-the-arts.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    According to the Law of Large Numbers, the frequency can represent the probability if the sample space is large enough.

  2. 2.

    Note that in this process the QA and QG models could be trained utilizing the dual learning framework.

References

  1. Bahdanau, D., Cho, K., Bengio, Y.: Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate. CoRR abs/1409.0473 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Bordes, A., Usunier, N., Chopra, S., Weston, J.: Large-scale simple question answering with memory networks. CoRR abs/1506.02075 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bordes, A., Usunier, N., García-Durán, A., Weston, J., Yakhnenko, O.: Translating embeddings for modeling multi-relational data. In: Proceedings of NIPS (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Dong, L., Lapata, M.: Language to logical form with neural attention. In: Proceedings of ACL (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Dong, L., Mallinson, J., Reddy, S., Lapata, M.: Learning to paraphrase for question answering. In: Proceedings of EMNLP, pp. 875–886 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  6. ElSahar, H., Gravier, C., Laforest, F.: Zero-shot question generation from knowledge graphs for unseen predicates and entity types. In: Proceedings of NAACL-HLT, pp. 218–228 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Hu, S., Zou, L., Yu, J.X., Wang, H., Zhao, D.: Answering natural language questions by subgraph matching over knowledge graphs. Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 30(5), 824–837 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Hu, S., Zou, L., Zhang, X.: A state-transition framework to answer complex questions over knowledge base. In: Proceedings of EMNLP, pp. 2098–2108 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Liu, C., He, S., Liu, K., Zhao, J.: Curriculum learning for natural answer generation. In: Proceedings of IJCAI, pp. 4223–4229 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Luong, T., Sutskever, I., Le, Q.V., Vinyals, O., Zaremba, W.: Addressing the rare word problem in neural machine translation. In: Proceedings of ACL (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Mintz, M., Bills, S., Snow, R., Jurafsky, D.: Distant supervision for relation extraction without labeled data. In: Proceedings of ACL, pp. 1003–1011 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Pennington, J., Socher, R., Manning, C.D.: GloVe: global vectors for word representation. In: Proceedings of EMNLP, pp. 1532–1543 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Serban, I.V., et al.: Generating factoid questions with recurrent neural networks: the 30 m factoid question-answer corpus. In: Proceedings of ACL (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Tang, D., Duan, N., Qin, T., Zhou, M.: Question answering and question generation as dual tasks. CoRR abs/1706.02027 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Yang, Y., Chang, M.: S-MART: novel tree-based structured learning algorithms applied to tweet entity linking. In: Proceedings of ACL, pp. 504–513 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Yang, Z., Hu, J., Salakhutdinov, R., Cohen, W.W.: Semi-supervised QA with generative domain-adaptive nets. In: Proceedings of ACL, pp. 1040–1050 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Yih, W., Chang, M., He, X., Gao, J.: Semantic parsing via staged query graph generation: question answering with knowledge base. In: ACL (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Yih, W., Richardson, M., Meek, C., Chang, M., Suh, J.: The value of semantic parse labeling for knowledge base question answering. In: Proceedings of ACL (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Yin, W., Yu, M., Xiang, B., Zhou, B., Schütze, H.: Simple question answering by attentive convolutional neural network. In: COLING, pp. 1746–1756 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Yu, L., Hermann, K.M., Blunsom, P., Pulman, S.: Deep learning for answer sentence selection. CoRR abs/1412.1632 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Yu, M., Yin, W., Hasan, K.S., dos Santos, C.N., Xiang, B., Zhou, B.: Improved neural relation detection for knowledge base question answering. In: Proceedings of ACL (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Zhou, P., et al.: Attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory networks for relation classification. In: Proceedings of ACL (2016)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by The National Key Research and Development Program of China under grant 2018YFB1003504 and NSFC under grant 61961130390, 61622201 and 61532010.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lei Zou .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Hu, S., Zou, L., Zhu, Z. (2019). How Question Generation Can Help Question Answering over Knowledge Base. In: Tang, J., Kan, MY., Zhao, D., Li, S., Zan, H. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing. NLPCC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11838. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32233-5_7

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32233-5_7

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32232-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32233-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics