Hierarchical Graph Network for Multi-hop Question Answering

Yuwei Fang, Siqi Sun, Zhe Gan, Rohit Pillai, Shuohang Wang, Jingjing Liu


Abstract
In this paper, we present Hierarchical Graph Network (HGN) for multi-hop question answering. To aggregate clues from scattered texts across multiple paragraphs, a hierarchical graph is created by constructing nodes on different levels of granularity (questions, paragraphs, sentences, entities), the representations of which are initialized with pre-trained contextual encoders. Given this hierarchical graph, the initial node representations are updated through graph propagation, and multi-hop reasoning is performed via traversing through the graph edges for each subsequent sub-task (e.g., paragraph selection, supporting facts extraction, answer prediction). By weaving heterogeneous nodes into an integral unified graph, this hierarchical differentiation of node granularity enables HGN to support different question answering sub-tasks simultaneously. Experiments on the HotpotQA benchmark demonstrate that the proposed model achieves new state of the art, outperforming existing multi-hop QA approaches.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.710
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8823–8838
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.710
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.710
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuwei Fang, Siqi Sun, Zhe Gan, Rohit Pillai, Shuohang Wang, and Jingjing Liu. 2020. Hierarchical Graph Network for Multi-hop Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8823–8838, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hierarchical Graph Network for Multi-hop Question Answering (Fang et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.710.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939187
Code
 yuwfan/HGN
Data
HotpotQAWikiHop