text: When answering natural language questions over knowledge bases (KBs), different question components and KB aspects play different roles. However, most existing embedding-based methods for knowledge base question answering (KBQA) ignore the subtle inter-relationships between the question and the KB (e.g., entity types, relation paths and context). In this work, we propose to directly model the two-way flow of interactions between the questions and the KB via a novel Bidirectional Attentive Memory Network, called BAMnet. Requiring no external resources and only very few hand-crafted features, on the WebQuestions benchmark, our method significantly outperforms existing information-retrieval based methods, and remains competitive with (hand-crafted) semantic parsing based methods. Also, since we use attention mechanisms, our method offers better interpretability compared to other baselines.
  @cite_30: Celebrated and its fruitful variants are powerful models to achieve excellent performance on the tasks that map sequences to sequences. However, these are many machine learning tasks with inputs naturally represented in a form of graphs, which imposes significant challenges to existing Seq2Seq models for lossless conversion from its graph form to the sequence. In this work, we present a general end-to-end approach to map the input graph to a sequence of vectors, and then another attention-based LSTM to decode the target sequence from these vectors. Specifically, to address inevitable information loss for data conversion, we introduce a novel graph-to-sequence neural network model that follows the encoder-decoder architecture. Our method first uses an improved graph-based neural network to generate the node and graph embeddings by a novel aggregation strategy to incorporate the edge direction information into the node embeddings. We also propose an attention based mechanism that aligns node embeddings and decoding sequence to better cope with large graphs. Experimental results on bAbI task, Shortest Path Task, and Natural Language Generation Task demonstrate that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperforms other baselines. We also show that with the proposed aggregation strategy, our proposed model is able to quickly converge to good performance.
  @cite_37: Templates are an important asset for question answering over knowledge graphs, simplifying the semantic parsing of input utterances and generating structured queries for interpretable answers. State-of-the-art methods rely on hand-crafted templates with limited coverage. This paper presents QUINT, a system that automatically learns utterance-query templates solely from user questions paired with their answers. Additionally, QUINT is able to harness language compositionality for answering complex questions without having any templates for the entire question. Experiments with different benchmarks demonstrate the high quality of QUINT.
  @cite_14: We propose a novel semantic parsing framework for question answering using a knowledge base. We define a query graph that resembles subgraphs of the knowledge base and can be directly mapped to a logical form. Semantic parsing is reduced to query graph generation, formulated as a staged search problem. Unlike traditional approaches, our method leverages the knowledge base in an early stage to prune the search space and thus simplifies the semantic matching problem. By applying an advanced entity linking system and a deep convolutional neural network model that matches questions and predicate sequences, our system outperforms previous methods substantially, and achieves an F1 measure of 52.5 on the WEBQUESTIONS dataset.
  @cite_18: Real-world factoid or list questions often have a simple structure, yet are hard to match to facts in a given knowledge base due to high representational and linguistic variability. For example, to answer "who is the ceo of apple" on Freebase requires a match to an abstract "leadership" entity with three relations "role", "organization" and "person", and two other entities "apple inc" and "managing director". Recent years have seen a surge of research activity on learning-based solutions for this method. We further advance the state of the art by adopting learning-to-rank methodology and by fully addressing the inherent entity recognition problem, which was neglected in recent works. We evaluate our system, called Aqqu, on two standard benchmarks, Free917 and WebQuestions, improving the previous best result for each benchmark considerably. These two benchmarks exhibit quite different challenges, and many of the existing approaches were evaluated (and work well) only for one of them. We also consider efficiency aspects and take care that all questions can be answered interactively (that is, within a second). Materials for full reproducibility are available on our website: http: ad.informatik.uni-freiburg.de publications.
  @cite_22: The strongly typed syntax of grammar formalisms such as CCG, TAG, LFG and HPSG offers a synchronous framework for deriving syntactic structures and semantic logical forms. In contrast---partly due to the lack of a strong type system---dependency structures are easy to annotate and have become a widely used form of syntactic analysis for many languages. However, the lack of a type system makes a formal mechanism for deriving logical forms from dependency structures challenging. We address this by introducing a robust system based on the lambda calculus for deriving neo-Davidsonian logical forms from dependency trees. These logical forms are then used for semantic parsing of natural language to Freebase. Experiments on the Free917 and WebQuestions datasets show that our representation is superior to the original dependency trees and that it outperforms a CCG-based representation on this task. Compared to prior work, we obtain the strongest result to date on Free917 and competitive results on WebQuestions.
  @cite_26: Transforming a natural language (NL) question into a corresponding logical form (LF) is central to the knowledge-based question answering (KB-QA) task. Unlike most previous methods that achieve this goal based on mappings between lexicalized phrases and logical predicates, this paper goes one step further and proposes a novel embedding-based approach that maps NL-questions into LFs for KBQA by leveraging semantic associations between lexical representations and KBproperties in the latent space. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms three KB-QA baseline methods on two publicly released QA data sets.
  @cite_8: RDF question answering (Q A) allows users to ask questions in natural languages over a knowledge base represented by RDF. To answer a natural language question, the existing work takes a two-stage approach: question understanding and query evaluation. Their focus is on question understanding to deal with the disambiguation of the natural language phrases. The most common technique is the joint disambiguation, which has the exponential search space. In this paper, we propose a systematic framework to answer natural language questions over RDF repository (RDF Q A) from a graph data-driven perspective. We propose a semantic query graph to model the query intention in the natural language question in a structural way, based on which, RDF Q A is reduced to subgraph matching problem. More importantly, we resolve the ambiguity of natural language questions at the time when matches of query are found. The cost of disambiguation is saved if there are no matching found. More specifically, we propose two different frameworks to build the semantic query graph, one is relation (edge)-first and the other one is node-first. We compare our method with some state-of-the-art RDF Q A systems in the benchmark dataset. Extensive experiments confirm that our method not only improves the precision but also speeds up query performance greatly.
  @cite_36: Semantic parsers conventionally construct logical forms bottom-up in a fixed order, resulting in the generation of many extraneous partial logical forms. In this paper, we combine ideas from imitation learning and agenda-based parsing to train a semantic parser that searches partial logical forms in a more strategic order. Empirically, our parser reduces the number of constructed partial logical forms by an order of magnitude, and obtains a 6x-9x speedup over fixed-order parsing, while maintaining comparable accuracy.
  @cite_28: Harnessing the statistical power of neural networks to perform language understanding and symbolic reasoning is difficult, when it requires executing efficient discrete operations against a large knowledge-base. In this work, we introduce a Neural Symbolic Machine, which contains (a) a neural "programmer", i.e., a sequence-to-sequence model that maps language utterances to programs and utilizes a key-variable memory to handle compositionality (b) a symbolic "computer", i.e., a Lisp interpreter that performs program execution, and helps find good programs by pruning the search space. We apply REINFORCE to directly optimize the task reward of this structured prediction problem. To train with weak supervision and improve the stability of REINFORCE, we augment it with an iterative maximum-likelihood training process. NSM outperforms the state-of-the-art on the WebQuestionsSP dataset when trained from question-answer pairs only, without requiring any feature engineering or domain-specific knowledge.
  @cite_9: 
  @cite_42: 
  @cite_1: We present a method for training a semantic parser using only a knowledge base and an unlabeled text corpus, without any individually annotated sentences. Our key observation is that multiple forms of weak supervision can be combined to train an accurate semantic parser: semantic supervision from a knowledge base, and syntactic supervision from dependency-parsed sentences. We apply our approach to train a semantic parser that uses 77 relations from Freebase in its knowledge representation. This semantic parser extracts instances of binary relations with state-of-the-art accuracy, while simultaneously recovering much richer semantic structures, such as conjunctions of multiple relations with partially shared arguments. We demonstrate recovery of this richer structure by extracting logical forms from natural language queries against Freebase. On this task, the trained semantic parser achieves 80 precision and 56 recall, despite never having seen an annotated logical form.
  @cite_0: In this paper, we train a semantic parser that scales up to Freebase. Instead of relying on annotated logical forms, which is especially expensive to obtain at large scale, we learn from question-answer pairs. The main challenge in this setting is narrowing down the huge number of possible logical predicates for a given question. We tackle this problem in two ways: First, we build a coarse mapping from phrases to predicates using a knowledge base and a large text corpus. Second, we use a bridging operation to generate additional predicates based on neighboring predicates. On the dataset of Cai and Yates (2013), despite not having annotated logical forms, our system outperforms their state-of-the-art parser. Additionally, we collected a more realistic and challenging dataset of question-answer pairs and improves over a natural baseline.
  @cite_43: Supervised training procedures for semantic parsers produce high-quality semantic parsers, but they have difficulty scaling to large databases because of the sheer number of logical constants for which they must see labeled training data. We present a technique for developing semantic parsers for large databases based on a reduction to standard supervised training algorithms, schema matching, and pattern learning. Leveraging techniques from each of these areas, we develop a semantic parser for Freebase that is capable of parsing questions with an F1 that improves by 0.42 over a purely-supervised learning algorithm.
  @cite_40: Answering natural language questions using the Freebase knowledge base has recently been explored as a platform for advancing the state of the art in open domain semantic parsing. Those efforts map questions to sophisticated meaning representations that are then attempted to be matched against viable answer candidates in the knowledge base. Here we show that relatively modest information extraction techniques, when paired with a webscale corpus, can outperform these sophisticated approaches by roughly 34 relative gain.
  @cite_5: Existing neural semantic parsers mainly utilize a sequence encoder, i.e., a sequential LSTM, to extract word order features while neglecting other valuable syntactic information such as dependency graph or constituent trees. In this paper, we first propose to use the to represent three types of syntactic information, i.e., word order, dependency and constituency features. We further employ a graph-to-sequence model to encode the syntactic graph and decode a logical form. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our model is comparable to the state-of-the-art on Jobs640, ATIS and Geo880. Experimental results on adversarial examples demonstrate the robustness of the model is also improved by encoding more syntactic information.
  @cite_25: As an increasing amount of RDF data is published as Linked Data, intuitive ways of accessing this data become more and more important. Question answering approaches have been proposed as a good compromise between intuitiveness and expressivity. Most question answering systems translate questions into triples which are matched against the RDF data to retrieve an answer, typically relying on some similarity metric. However, in many cases, triples do not represent a faithful representation of the semantic structure of the natural language question, with the result that more expressive queries can not be answered. To circumvent this problem, we present a novel approach that relies on a parse of the question to produce a SPARQL template that directly mirrors the internal structure of the question. This template is then instantiated using statistical entity identification and predicate detection. We show that this approach is competitive and discuss cases of questions that can be answered with our approach but not with competing approaches.
  @cite_17: 
summary: Two broad classes of SP-based and IR-based approaches have been proposed for KBQA. The former attempts to convert NL questions to logic forms. Recent work focused on approaches based on weak supervision from either external resources @cite_1 @cite_0 @cite_40 @cite_8 @cite_14 @cite_9 , schema matching @cite_43 , or using hand-crafted rules and features @cite_25 @cite_0 @cite_36 @cite_22 @cite_17 @cite_37 @cite_8 @cite_18 @cite_14 . A thread of research has been explored to generate semantic query graphs from NL questions such as using coarse alignment between phrases and predicates @cite_0 , searching partial logical forms via an agenda-based strategy @cite_36 , pushing down the disambiguation step into the query evaluation stage @cite_8 , or exploiting rich syntactic information in NL questions @cite_30 @cite_5 . Notably, another thread of SP-based approaches try to exploit IR-based techniques @cite_40 @cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_14 @cite_17 @cite_9 @cite_28 by computing the similarity of two sequences as features, leveraging a neural network-based answer type prediction model, or training end-to-end neural symbolic machine via REINFORCE @cite_42 . However, most SP-based approaches more or less rely on hand-crafted rules or features, which limits their scalability and transferability.