Skip to main content

Enhanced Simple Question Answering with Contrastive Learning

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13368))

Abstract

Answer natural language questions on knowledge bases (\(\mathsf {KBQA}\)) has attracted wide attention. Several techniques have been developed for answering simple questions. These techniques mostly rely on deep networks to perform classification for relation prediction. Nowadays, contrastive learning has shown its powers in improving performances of classification, while most prior techniques do not gain benefit from this. In light of these, we propose a novel approach to answering simple questions on knowledge bases. Our approach has two key features. (1) It leverages pre-trained transformers to gain better performance on entity linking. (2) It employs a contrastive learning based model for relation prediction. We experimentally verify the performance of our approach, and show that our approach achieves an accuracy of 83.54%, which beats existing state-of-the-art techniques, on a typical benchmark dataset; we also conduct a deep analysis to show advantages of our technique, especially its sub-modules.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 99.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Removed Questions. https://github.com/Mycatinjuly/SimpleQuestion_QA

  2. Bast, H., Haussmann, E.: More accurate question answering on freebase. In: Proceedings of the 24th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 1431–1440 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Berant, J., Chou, A., Frostig, R., Liang, P.: Semantic parsing on freebase from question-answer pairs. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1533–1544. ACL (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Bollacker, K.D., Evans, C., Paritosh, P., Sturge, T., Taylor, J.: Freebase: a collaboratively created graph database for structuring human knowledge. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pp. 1247–1250 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Bordes, A., Chopra, S., Weston, J.: Question answering with subgraph embeddings. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 615–620 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Bordes, A., Usunier, N., Chopra, S., Weston, J.: Large-scale simple question answering with memory networks. CoRR abs/1506.02075 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Bordes, A., Weston, J., Usunier, N.: Open question answering with weakly supervised embedding models. In: Calders, T., Esposito, F., Hüllermeier, E., Meo, R. (eds.) ECML PKDD 2014. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 8724, pp. 165–180. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44848-9_11

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  8. Cai, Q., Yates, A.: Large-scale semantic parsing via schema matching and lexicon extension. In: Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 423–433 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Carlsson, F., Gyllensten, A.C., Gogoulou, E., Hellqvist, E.Y., Sahlgren, M.: Semantic re-tuning with contrastive tension. In: International Conference on Learning Representations (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Chen, T., Kornblith, S., Norouzi, M., Hinton, G.: A simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. In: International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 1597–1607. PMLR (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Cheng, L., Chen, Z., Ren, J.: Enhancing question answering over knowledge base using dynamical relation reasoning. In: 2020 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), pp. 1–8. IEEE (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Deng, Y., Zhang, W., Lam, W.: Learning to rank question answer pairs with bilateral contrastive data augmentation. In: Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text, pp. 175–181 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Devlin, J., Chang, M., Lee, K., Toutanova, K.: BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 4171–4186 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Dong, L., Wei, F., Zhou, M., Xu, K.: Question answering over freebase with multi-column convolutional neural networks. In: Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pp. 260–269 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Fader, A., Zettlemoyer, L.S., Etzioni, O.: Paraphrase-driven learning for open question answering. In: Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1608–1618 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Gupta, V., Chinnakotla, M., Shrivastava, M.: Retrieve and re-rank: a simple and effective IR approach to simple question answering over knowledge graphs. In: Proceedings of the First Workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification), pp. 22–27, November 2018

    Google Scholar 

  17. Hadsell, R., Chopra, S., LeCun, Y.: Dimensionality reduction by learning an invariant mapping. In: 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2006), vol. 2, pp. 1735–1742. IEEE (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Hao, Y., Liu, H., He, S., Liu, K., Zhao, J.: Pattern-revising enhanced simple question answering over knowledge bases. In: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 3272–3282 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  19. He, K., Fan, H., Wu, Y., Xie, S., Girshick, R.: Momentum contrast for unsupervised visual representation learning. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 9729–9738 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Howard, J., Ruder, S.: Universal language model fine-tuning for text classification. In: Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 328–339 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Lehmann, J., et al.: DBpedia - a large-scale, multilingual knowledge base extracted from Wikipedia. Semant. Web 6(2), 167–195 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Lin, T., Goyal, P., Girshick, R.B., He, K., Dollár, P.: Focal loss for dense object detection. In: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 2999–3007 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Lukovnikov, D., Fischer, A., Lehmann, J.: Pretrained transformers for simple question answering over knowledge graphs. In: Ghidini, C., et al. (eds.) ISWC 2019. LNCS, vol. 11778, pp. 470–486. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30793-6_27

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  24. Lukovnikov, D., Fischer, A., Lehmann, J., Auer, S.: Neural network-based question answering over knowledge graphs on word and character level. In: Barrett, R., Cummings, R., Agichtein, E., Gabrilovich, E. (eds.) Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 1211–1220. ACM (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Luo, D., Su, J., Yu, S.: A Bert-based approach with relation-aware attention for knowledge base question answering. In: 2020 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), pp. 1–8. IEEE (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Maheshwari, G., Trivedi, P., Lukovnikov, D., Chakraborty, N., Fischer, A., Lehmann, J.: Learning to rank query graphs for complex question answering over knowledge graphs. In: Ghidini, C., et al. (eds.) ISWC 2019. LNCS, vol. 11778, pp. 487–504. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30793-6_28

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  27. Mohammed, S., Shi, P., Lin, J.: Strong baselines for simple question answering over knowledge graphs with and without neural networks. In: Walker, M.A., Ji, H., Stent, A. (eds.) Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 291–296. Association for Computational Linguistics (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Qin, Y., et al.: ERICA: improving entity and relation understanding for pre-trained language models via contrastive learning. In: Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 3350–3363 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Qiu, C., Zhou, G., Cai, Z., Søgaard, A.: A global-local attentive relation detection model for knowledge-based question answering. IEEE Trans. Artif. Intell. 2(2), 200–212 (2021)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Qu, Y., Liu, J., Kang, L., Shi, Q., Ye, D.: Question answering over freebase via attentive RNN with similarity matrix based CNN. CoRR abs/1804.03317 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Rao, J., He, H., Lin, J.: Noise-contrastive estimation for answer selection with deep neural networks. In: Proceedings of the 25th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 1913–1916 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Reddy, S., Lapata, M., Steedman, M.: Large-scale semantic parsing without question-answer pairs. Trans. Assoc. Comput. Linguist. 2, 377–392 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Sharath, J.S., Rekabdar, B.: Question answering over knowledge base using language model embeddings. In: 2020 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, pp. 1–8. IEEE (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Suchanek, F.M., Kasneci, G., Weikum, G.: Yago: a core of semantic knowledge. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 697–706 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Sun, Y., et al.: Semantic parsing with syntax- and table-aware SQL generation. In: Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 361–372 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Wang, Y., Zhang, R., Xu, C., Mao, Y.: The APVA-TURBO approach to question answering in knowledge base. In: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 1998–2009 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Yao, X., Durme, B.V.: Information extraction over structured data: question answering with freebase. In: Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 956–966 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Yih, W., Chang, M., He, X., Gao, J.: Semantic parsing via staged query graph generation: question answering with knowledge base. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1321–1331 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Yin, W., Yu, M., Xiang, B., Zhou, B., Schütze, H.: Simple question answering by attentive convolutional neural network. In: COLING 2016, 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference: Technical Papers, pp. 1746–1756 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  40. Yu, M., Yin, W., Hasan, K.S., dos Santos, C.N., Xiang, B., Zhou, B.: Improved neural relation detection for knowledge base question answering. In: Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 571–581 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  41. Zhang, Y., He, R., Liu, Z., Lim, K.H., Bing, L.: An unsupervised sentence embedding method by mutual information maximization. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1601–1610 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  42. Zhang, Y., Jin, L., Zhang, Z., Li, X., Liu, Q., Wang, H.: SF-ANN: leveraging structural features with an attention neural network for candidate fact ranking. Appl. Intell. 1–16 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgement

This work is supported by Sichuan Scientific Innovation Fund (No. 2022JDRC0009) and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2017YFA0700800).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Honglian He .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Wang, X., Yang, L., He, H., Fang, Y., Zhan, H., Zhang, J. (2022). Enhanced Simple Question Answering with Contrastive Learning. In: Memmi, G., Yang, B., Kong, L., Zhang, T., Qiu, M. (eds) Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management. KSEM 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13368. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10983-6_39

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10983-6_39

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-10982-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-10983-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics