Papers › Repurposing Entailment for Multi-Hop Question Answering Tasks

Repurposing Entailment for Multi-Hop Question Answering Tasks

20 Apr 2019NAACL 2019 6arXiv:1904.09380archive 2025-07-28

Harsh Trivedi, Heeyoung Kwon, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, Niranjan Balasubramanian

Question Answering (QA) naturally reduces to an entailment problem, namely, verifying whether some text entails the answer to a question. However, for multi-hop QA tasks, which require reasoning with multiple sentences, it remains unclear how best to utilize entailment models pre-trained on large scale datasets such as SNLI, which are based on sentence pairs. We introduce Multee, a general architecture that can effectively use entailment models for multi-hop QA tasks. Multee uses (i) a local module that helps locate important sentences, thereby avoiding distracting information, and (ii) a global module that aggregates information by effectively incorporating importance weights. Importantly, we show that both modules can use entailment functions pre-trained on a large scale NLI datasets. We evaluate performance on MultiRC and OpenBookQA, two multihop QA datasets. When using an entailment function pre-trained on NLI datasets, Multee outperforms QA models trained only on the target QA datasets and the OpenAI transformer models. The code is available at https://github.com/StonyBrookNLP/multee.

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StonyBrookNLP/multee officialmentioned in paperpytorch report
soujanyarbhat/aNswER_multirc mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
varunchaudharycs/aNswER_multirc mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
varunchaudharycs/multi_rc mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Multi-hop Question AnsweringQuestion AnsweringSentence

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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