{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/modeling-transitions-of-focal-entities-for","title":"Modeling Transitions of Focal Entities for Conversational Knowledge Base Question Answering","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-08-01","proceeding":"ACL 2021 5","authors":["Yunshi Lan","Jing Jiang"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.255","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.255.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"modeling-transitions-of-focal-entities-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/lanyunshi/conversationalkbqa","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"graph-neural-network","task_name":"Graph Neural Network"},{"task_slug":"knowledge-base-question-answering","task_name":"Knowledge Base Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"graph-neural-network","method_name":"Graph Neural Network"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}