Abstract: While there has been substantial progress in factoid question-answering (QA), answering complex questions remains challenging, typically requiring both a large body of knowledge and inference techniques. Open Information Extraction (Open IE) provides a way to generate semi-structured knowledge for QA, but to date such knowledge has only been used to answer simple questions with retrieval-based methods. We overcome this limitation by presenting a method for reasoning with Open IE knowledge, allowing more complex questions to be handled. Using a recently proposed support graph optimization framework for QA, we develop a new inference model for Open IE, in particular one that can work effectively with multiple short facts, noise, and the relational structure of tuples. Our model significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art structured solver on complex questions of varying difficulty, while also removing the reliance on manually curated knowledge.

Introduction: Effective question answering (QA) systems have been a long-standing quest of AI research. Structured curated KBs have been used successfully for this task BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 . However, these KBs are expensive to build and typically domain-specific. Automatically constructed open vocabulary (subject; predicate; object) style tuples have broader coverage, but have only been used for simple questions where a single tuple suffices BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 . Our goal in this work is to develop a QA system that can perform reasoning with Open IE BIBREF4 tuples for complex multiple-choice questions that require tuples from multiple sentences. Such a system can answer complex questions in resource-poor domains where curated knowledge is unavailable. Elementary-level science exams is one such domain, requiring complex reasoning BIBREF5 . Due to the lack of a large-scale structured KB, state-of-the-art systems for this task either rely on shallow reasoning with large text corpora BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 or deeper, structured reasoning with a small amount of automatically acquired BIBREF8 or manually curated BIBREF9 knowledge. Consider the following question from an Alaska state 4th grade science test: Which object in our solar system reflects light and is a satellite that orbits around one planet? (A) Earth (B) Mercury (C) the Sun (D) the Moon This question is challenging for QA systems because of its complex structure and the need for multi-fact reasoning. A natural way to answer it is by combining facts such as (Moon; is; in the solar system), (Moon; reflects; light), (Moon; is; satellite), and (Moon; orbits; around one planet). A candidate system for such reasoning, and which we draw inspiration from, is the TableILP system of BIBREF9 . TableILP treats QA as a search for an optimal subgraph that connects terms in the question and answer via rows in a set of curated tables, and solves the optimization problem using Integer Linear Programming (ILP). We similarly want to search for an optimal subgraph. However, a large, automatically extracted tuple KB makes the reasoning context different on three fronts: (a) unlike reasoning with tables, chaining tuples is less important and reliable as join rules aren't available; (b) conjunctive evidence becomes paramount, as, unlike a long table row, a single tuple is less likely to cover the entire question; and (c) again, unlike table rows, tuples are noisy, making combining redundant evidence essential. Consequently, a table-knowledge centered inference model isn't the best fit for noisy tuples. To address this challenge, we present a new ILP-based model of inference with tuples, implemented in a reasoner called TupleInf. We demonstrate that TupleInf significantly outperforms TableILP by 11.8% on a broad set of over 1,300 science questions, without requiring manually curated tables, using a substantially simpler ILP formulation, and generalizing well to higher grade levels. The gains persist even when both solvers are provided identical knowledge. This demonstrates for the first time how Open IE based QA can be extended from simple lookup questions to an effective system for complex questions.

Question: What is the accuracy of the proposed technique?
Answer: 51.7 and 51.6 on 4th and 8th grade question sets with no curated knowledge. 47.5 and 48.0 on 4th and 8th grade question sets when both solvers are given the same knowledge