Abstract: We show that a character-level encoder-decoder framework can be successfully applied to question answering with a structured knowledge base. We use our model for single-relation question answering and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the SimpleQuestions dataset (Bordes et al., 2015), where we improve state-of-the-art accuracy from 63.9% to 70.9%, without use of ensembles. Importantly, our character-level model has 16x fewer parameters than an equivalent word-level model, can be learned with significantly less data compared to previous work, which relies on data augmentation, and is robust to new entities in testing.

Introduction: Single-relation factoid questions are the most common form of questions found in search query logs and community question answering websites BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 . A knowledge-base (KB) such as Freebase, DBpedia, or Wikidata can help answer such questions after users reformulate them as queries. For instance, the question Where was Barack Obama born? can be answered by issuing the following KB query: $
\lambda (x).place\_of\_birth(Barack\_Obama, x)
$   However, automatically mapping a natural language question such as Where was Barack Obama born? to its corresponding KB query remains a challenging task. There are three key issues that make learning this mapping non-trivial. First, there are many paraphrases of the same question. Second, many of the KB entries are unseen during training time; however, we still need to correctly predict them at test time. Third, a KB such as Freebase typically contains millions of entities and thousands of predicates, making it difficult for a system to predict these entities at scale BIBREF1 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF0 . In this paper, we address all three of these issues with a character-level encoder-decoder framework that significantly improves performance over state-of-the-art word-level neural models, while also providing a much more compact model that can be learned from less data. First, we use a long short-term memory (LSTM) BIBREF4 encoder to embed the question. Second, to make our model robust to unseen KB entries, we extract embeddings for questions, predicates and entities purely from their character-level representations. Character-level modeling has been previously shown to generalize well to new words not seen during training BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , which makes it ideal for this task. Third, to scale our model to handle the millions of entities and thousands of predicates in the KB, instead of using a large output layer in the decoder to directly predict the entity and predicate, we use a general interaction function between the question embeddings and KB embeddings that measures their semantic relevance to determine the output. The combined use of character-level modeling and a semantic relevance function allows us to successfully produce likelihood scores for the KB entries that are not present in our vocabulary, a challenging task for standard encoder-decoder frameworks. Our novel, character-level encoder-decoder model is compact, requires significantly less data to train than previous work, and is able to generalize well to unseen entities in test time. In particular, without use of ensembles, we achieve 70.9% accuracy in the Freebase2M setting and 70.3% accuracy in the Freebase5M setting on the SimpleQuestions dataset, outperforming the previous state-of-arts of 62.7% and 63.9% BIBREF0 by 8.2% and 6.4% respectively. Moreover, we only use the training questions provided in SimpleQuestions to train our model, which cover about 24% of words in entity aliases on the test set. This demonstrates the robustness of the character-level model to unseen entities. In contrast, data augmentation is usually necessary to provide more coverage for unseen entities and predicates, as done in previous work BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 .

Question: What word level and character level model baselines are used?
Answer: Word-level Memory Neural Networks (MemNNs) proposed in Bordes et al. (2015)