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QAGCN: Answering Multi-relation Questions via Single-Step Implicit Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs

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The Semantic Web (ESWC 2024)

Abstract

Multi-relation question answering (QA) is a challenging task, where given questions usually require long reasoning chains in KGs that consist of multiple relations. Recently, methods with explicit multi-step reasoning over KGs have been prominently used in this task and have demonstrated promising performance. Examples include methods that perform stepwise label propagation through KG triples and methods that navigate over KG triples based on reinforcement learning. A main weakness of these methods is that their reasoning mechanisms are usually complex and difficult to implement or train. In this paper, we argue that multi-relation QA can be achieved via end-to-end single-step implicit reasoning, which is simpler, more efficient, and easier to adopt. We propose QAGCN — a Question-Aware Graph Convolutional Network (GCN)-based method that includes a novel GCN architecture with controlled question-dependent message propagation for the implicit reasoning. Extensive experiments have been conducted, where QAGCN achieved competitive and even superior performance compared to state-of-the-art explicit-reasoning methods. Our code and pre-trained models are available in the repository: https://github.com/ruijie-wang-uzh/QAGCN.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    If topic entities are not annotated, they can still be easily obtained via named entity recognition, which has been widely studied for decades.

  2. 2.

    https://huggingface.co/bert-base-uncased.

  3. 3.

    https://bert-as-service.readthedocs.io/.

  4. 4.

    https://networkx.org/ and https://graph-tool.skewed.de.

  5. 5.

    We ignore relation directions in this process.

  6. 6.

    In the original form of this question, all letters are lowercase, the entity phrase is connected by underlines (e.g., marguerite_louise_dorleans). We slightly change the format for better readability.

  7. 7.

    The values of k were set to be consistent with those used in the complete model.

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Acknowledgement

This work has been partially supported by the University Research Priority Program “Dynamics of Healthy Aging” at the University of Zurich and the Swiss National Science Foundation through project MediaGraph (contract no. 202125). Michael Cochez is partially funded by the Graph-Massivizer project, funded by the Horizon Europe programme of the European Union (grant 101093202).

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Wang, R., Rossetto, L., Cochez, M., Bernstein, A. (2024). QAGCN: Answering Multi-relation Questions via Single-Step Implicit Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs. In: Meroño Peñuela, A., et al. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14664. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60626-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60626-7_3

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