Conditional question answering on long documents aims to find probable answers and identify conditions that need to be satisfied to make the answers correct over long documents. Existing approaches solve this task by segmenting long documents into multiple sections, and attending information at global and local tokens to predict the answers and corresponding conditions. However, the natural structure of the document and discourse relations between sentences in each document section are ignored, which are crucial for condition retrieving across sections, as well as logical interaction over the question and conditions. To address this issue, this paper constructs a Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph (SDHG) and conducts bottom-up information propagation. Firstly we build the sentence-level discourse graphs for each section and encode the discourse relations by graph attention. Secondly, we construct a section-level structure graph based on natural structures, and conduct interactions over the question and contexts. Finally different levels of representations are integrated into jointly answer and condition decoding. The experiments on the benchmark ConditionalQA shows our approach gains over the prior state-of-the-art, by 3.0 EM score and 2.4 F1 score on answer measuring, as well as 2.2 EM score and 1.9 F1 score on jointly answer and condition measuring.

With the help of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various reasoning tasks. However, most of them have been evaluated under noise-free context and the dilemma for LLMs to produce inaccurate results under the noisy context has not been fully investigated. Existing studies utilize trigger sentences to encourage LLMs to concentrate on the relevant information but the trigger has limited effect on final answer prediction. Inspired by interactive CoT method, where intermediate reasoning steps are promoted by multiple rounds of interaction between users and LLMs, we propose a novel prompting method, namely R³ prompting, for CoT reasoning under noisy context. Specifically, R³ prompting interacts with LLMs to perform key sentence extraction, variable declaration and answer prediction, which corresponds to a thought process of reviewing, rephrasing and resolving. The responses generated at the last interaction will perform as hints to guide toward the responses of the next interaction. Our experiments show that R³ prompting significantly outperforms existing CoT prompting methods on five reasoning tasks under noisy context. With GPT-3.5-turbo, we observe 3.7% accuracy improvement on average on the reasoning tasks under noisy context compared to the most competitive prompting baseline. More analyses and ablation studies show the robustness and generalization of R³ prompting method in solving reasoning tasks in LLMs under noisy context.

The task of Question Generation over Knowledge Bases (KBQG) aims to convert a logical form into a natural language question. For the sake of expensive cost of large-scale question annotation, the methods of KBQG under low-resource scenarios urgently need to be developed. However, current methods heavily rely on annotated data for fine-tuning, which is not well-suited for few-shot question generation. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown their impressive generalization ability in few-shot tasks. Inspired by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, which is an in-context learning strategy for reasoning, we formulate KBQG task as a reasoning problem, where the generation of a complete question is splitted into a series of sub-question generation. Our proposed prompting method KQG-CoT first retrieves supportive logical forms from the unlabeled data pool taking account of the characteristics of the logical form. Then, we write a prompt to explicit the reasoning chain of generating complicated questions based on the selected demonstrations. To further ensure prompt quality, we extend KQG-CoT into KQG-CoT+ via sorting the logical forms by their complexity. We conduct extensive experiments over three public KBQG datasets. The results demonstrate that our prompting method consistently outperforms other prompting baselines on the evaluated datasets. Remarkably, our KQG-CoT+ method could surpass existing few-shot SoTA results of the PathQuestions dataset by 18.25, 10.72, and 10.18 absolute points on BLEU-4, METEOR, and ROUGE-L, respectively.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been shown to deliver impressive performance in various NLP tasks. To tackle multi-step reasoning tasks, Few-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting includes a few manually crafted step-by-step reasoning demonstrations which enable LLMs to explicitly generate reasoning steps and improve their reasoning task accuracy. To eliminate the manual efforts, Zero-shot-CoT concatenates the target problem statement with “Let’s think step by step” as an input prompt to LLMs. Despite the success of Zero-shot-CoT, it still suffers from three pitfalls: calculation errors, missing-step errors, and semantic misunderstanding errors. To address the missing-step errors, we propose Plan-and-Solve (PS) Prompting. It consists of two components: first, devising a plan to divide the entire task into smaller subtasks, and then carrying out the subtasks according to the plan. To address the calculation errors and improve the quality of generated reasoning steps, we extend PS prompting with more detailed instructions and derive PS+ prompting. We evaluate our proposed prompting strategy on ten datasets across three reasoning problems. The experimental results over GPT-3 show that our proposed zero-shot prompting consistently outperforms Zero-shot-CoT across all datasets by a large margin, is comparable to or exceeds Zero-shot-Program-of-Thought Prompting, and has comparable performance with 8-shot CoT prompting on the math reasoning problem. The code can be found at https://github.com/AGI-Edgerunners/Plan-and-Solve-Prompting.

Context information modeling is an important task in conversational KBQA. However, existing methods usually assume the independence of utterances and model them in isolation. In this paper, we propose a History Semantic Graph Enhanced KBQA model (HSGE) that is able to effectively model long-range semantic dependencies in conversation history while maintaining low computational cost. The framework incorporates a context-aware encoder, which employs a dynamic memory decay mechanism and models context at different levels of granularity. We evaluate HSGE on a widely used benchmark dataset for complex sequential question answering. Experimental results demonstrate that it outperforms existing baselines averaged on all question types.

Math word problem (MWP) solving faces a dilemma in number representation learning. In order to avoid the number representation issue and reduce the search space of feasible solutions, existing works striving for MWP solving usually replace real numbers with symbolic placeholders to focus on logic reasoning. However, different from common symbolic reasoning tasks like program synthesis and knowledge graph reasoning, MWP solving has extra requirements in numerical reasoning. In other words, instead of the number value itself, it is the reusable numerical property that matters more in numerical reasoning. Therefore, we argue that injecting numerical properties into symbolic placeholders with contextualized representation learning schema can provide a way out of the dilemma in the number representation issue here. In this work, we introduce this idea to the popular pre-training language model (PLM) techniques and build MWP-BERT, an effective contextual number representation PLM. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our MWP-BERT on MWP solving and several MWP-specific understanding tasks on both English and Chinese benchmarks.

Conversational KBQA is about answering a sequence of questions related to a KB. Follow-up questions in conversational KBQA often have missing information referring to entities from the conversation history. In this paper, we propose to model these implied entities, which we refer to as the focal entities of the conversation. We propose a novel graph-based model to capture the transitions of focal entities and apply a graph neural network to derive a probability distribution of focal entities for each question, which is then combined with a standard KBQA module to perform answer ranking. Our experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Previous work on answering complex questions from knowledge bases usually separately addresses two types of complexity: questions with constraints and questions with multiple hops of relations. In this paper, we handle both types of complexity at the same time. Motivated by the observation that early incorporation of constraints into query graphs can more effectively prune the search space, we propose a modified staged query graph generation method with more flexible ways to generate query graphs. Our experiments clearly show that our method achieves the state of the art on three benchmark KBQA datasets.

In this paper, we study how we can improve a deep learning approach to textual entailment by incorporating lexical entailment relations from WordNet. Our idea is to embed the lexical entailment knowledge contained in WordNet in specially-learned word vectors, which we call “entailment vectors.” We present a standard neural network model and a novel set-theoretic model to learn these entailment vectors from word pairs with known lexical entailment relations derived from WordNet. We further incorporate these entailment vectors into a decomposable attention model for textual entailment and evaluate the model on the SICK and the SNLI dataset. We find that using these special entailment word vectors, we can significantly improve the performance of textual entailment compared with a baseline that uses only standard word2vec vectors. The final performance of our model is close to or above the state of the art, but our method does not rely on any manually-crafted rules or extensive syntactic features.