Singapore

While question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) has shown progress in addressing factoid questions, KBQA with numerical reasoning remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we focus on the complex numerical reasoning in KBQA, and propose a new task, NR-KBQA, which necessitates the ability to perform both multi-hop reasoning and numerical reasoning. We also design a logic form in Python format called PyQL to represent the reasoning process of numerical reasoning questions. To facilitate the development of NR-KBQA, we present a large NR-KBQA dataset called MarkQA, which is automatically constructed by a small set of seeds. Each question in MarkQA is annotated with its corresponding SPARQL query, alongside the step-by-step reasoning path in the QDMR format and PyQL program. Experimental results of some state-of-the-art QA methods performed on the MarkQA dataset show that complex numerical reasoning in KBQA faces great challenges.

EMNLP 2023

MarkQA: A large scale KBQA dataset with numerical reasoning

complex reasoning

numerical reasoning

knowledge base

question answering

dataset

poster

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

In multimodal understanding tasks, visual and linguistic ambiguities can arise. Visual ambiguity can occur when visual objects require a model to ground a referring expression in a video without strong supervision, while linguistic ambiguity can occur from changes in entities in action flows. As an example from the cooking domain, "oil" mixed with "salt" and "pepper" could later be referred to as a "mixture". Without a clear visual-linguistic alignment, we cannot know which among several objects shown is referred to by the language expression “mixture”, and without resolved antecedents, we cannot pinpoint what the mixture is. We define this chicken-and-egg problem as Visual-linguistic Ambiguity. In this paper, we present Find2Find, a joint anaphora resolution and object localization dataset targeting the problem of \emph{visual-linguistic ambiguity}, consisting of 500 anaphora-annotated recipes with corresponding videos. We present experimental results of a novel end-to-end joint multitask learning framework for Find2Find that fuses visual and textual information and shows improvements both for anaphora resolution and object localization with one joint model in multitask learning, as compared to a strong single-task baseline.

Find-2-Find: Multitask Learning for Anaphora Resolution and Object Localization

Temporal question answering (QA) is a special category of complex question answering task that requires reasoning over facts asserting time intervals of events. Previous works have predominately relied on Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) for temporal QA. One of the major challenges faced by these systems is their inability to retrieve all relevant facts due to factors such as incomplete KB and entity/relation linking errors. A failure to fetch even a single fact will block KBQA from computing the answer. Such cases of KB incompleteness are even more profound in the temporal context. To address this issue, we explore an interesting direction where a targeted temporal fact extraction technique is used to assist KBQA whenever it fails to retrieve temporal facts from the KB. We model the extraction problem as an open-domain question answering task using off-the-shelf language models. This way, we target to extract from textual resources those facts that failed to get retrieved from the KB. Experimental results on two temporal QA benchmarks show promising ~30% & ~10% relative improvements in answer accuracies without any additional training cost.

Best of Both Worlds: Towards Improving Temporal Knowledge Base Question Answering via Targeted Fact Extraction

Research in Text-to-SQL conversion has been largely benchmarked against datasets where each text query corresponds to one correct SQL. However, natural language queries over real-life databases frequently involve significant ambiguity about the intended SQL due to overlapping schema names and multiple confusing relationship paths. To bridge this gap, we develop a novel benchmark called AmbiQT with over 3000 examples where each text is interpretable as two plausible SQLs due to lexical and/or structural ambiguity. 

When faced with ambiguity, an ideal top-$k$ decoder should generate all valid interpretations for possible disambiguation by the user. We evaluate several Text-to-SQL systems and decoding algorithms, including those employing state-of-the-art LLMs, and find them to be far from this ideal. The primary reason is that the prevalent beam search algorithm and its variants, treat SQL queries as a string and produce unhelpful token-level diversity in the top-$k$.

We propose LogicalBeam, a new decoding algorithm that navigates the SQL logic space using a blend of plan-based template generation and constrained infilling. Counterfactually generated plans diversify templates while in-filling with a beam-search that branches solely on schema names provides value diversity. LogicalBeam is up to $2.5$ times more effective than state-of-the-art models at generating all candidate SQLs in the top-$k$ ranked outputs. It also enhances the top-$5$ Exact and Execution Match Accuracies on SPIDER and Kaggle DBQA.

Benchmarking and Improving Text-to-SQL Generation under Ambiguity | VIDEO

Parsing questions into executable logical forms has showed impressive results for knowledge-base question answering (KBQA). However, complex KBQA is a more challenging task that requires to perform complex multi-step reasoning. Recently, a new semantic parser called KoPL has been proposed to explicitly model the reasoning processes, which achieved the state-of-the-art on complex KBQA. In this paper, we further explore how to unlock the reasoning ability of semantic parsers by a simple proposed parse-execute-refine paradigm. We refine and improve the KoPL parser by demonstrating the executed intermediate reasoning steps to the KBQA model. We show that such simple strategy can significantly improve the ability of complex reasoning. Specifically, we propose three components: a parsing stage, an execution stage and a refinement stage, to enhance the ability of complex reasoning. The parser uses the KoPL to generate the transparent logical forms. Then, the execution stage aligns and executes the logical forms over knowledge base to obtain intermediate reasoning processes. Finally, the intermediate step-by-step reasoning processes are demonstrated to the KBQA model in the refinement stage. With the explicit reasoning processes, it is much easier to answer the complex questions. Experiments on benchmark dataset shows that the proposed PER-KBQA performs significantly better than the stage-of-the-art baselines on the complex KBQA.

From Parse-Execute to Parse-Execute-Refine: Improving Semantic Parser for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base | VIDEO

Given a textual passage and an answer, humans are able to ask questions with various expressions, but this ability is still challenging for most question generation (QG) systems. Existing solutions mainly focus on the internal knowledge within the given passage or the semantic word space for diverse content planning. These methods, however, have not considered the potential of external knowledge for expression diversity. To bridge this gap, we propose RAST, a framework for Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer, where the objective is to utilize the style of diverse templates for question generation. For training RAST, we develop a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL) based approach that maximizes a weighted combination of diversity reward and consistency reward. Here, the consistency reward is computed by a Question-Answering (QA) model, whereas the diversity reward measures how much the final output mimics the retrieved template. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous diversity-driven baselines on diversity while being comparable in terms of consistency scores. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/gouqi666/RAST}.

Diversify Question Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer | VIDEO

Pre-training on large-scale open-domain dialogue data can substantially improve the performance of dialogue models. However, the pre-trained dialogue model's ability to utilize long-range context is limited due to the scarcity of long-turn dialogue sessions. Most dialogues in existing pre-training corpora contain fewer than three turns of dialogue. To alleviate this issue, we propose the Retrieve, Reorganize and Rescale framework (Re$^3$Dial), which can automatically construct billion-scale long-turn dialogues by reorganizing existing short-turn ones. Given a short-turn session, Re$^3$Dial first employs a session retriever to retrieve coherent consecutive sessions. To this end, we train the retriever to capture semantic and discourse relations within multi-turn dialogues through contrastive training. Next, Re$^3$Dial samples a session from retrieved results following a diversity sampling strategy, which is designed to penalize repetitive or generic sessions. A longer session is then derived by concatenating the original session and the sampled session. By repeating the above process, Re$^3$Dial can yield a coherent long-turn dialogue. Extensive experiments on multiple multi-turn dialogue benchmarks demonstrate that Re$^3$Dial significantly improves the dialogue model's ability to utilize long-range context and thus generate more sensible and informative responses. Finally, we build a toolkit for efficiently rescaling conversations with Re$^3$Dial, which enables us to construct a corpus containing 1B Chinese dialogue sessions with 11.3 turns on average (5X longer than the original corpus). We will release our retriever model, toolkit, and data for public use.

Re3Dial: Retrieve, Reorganize and Rescale Conversations for Long-Turn Open-Domain Dialogue Pre-training

Question answering over hybrid contexts is a complex task, which requires the combination of information extracted from unstructured texts and structured tables in various ways. Recently, In-Context Learning demonstrated significant performance advances for reasoning tasks. In this paradigm, a large language model performs predictions based on a small set of supporting exemplars. The performance of In-Context Learning depends heavily on the selection procedure of the supporting exemplars, particularly in the case of HybridQA, where considering the diversity of reasoning chains and the large size of the hybrid contexts becomes crucial. In this work, we present Selection of ExEmplars for hybrid Reasoning (SEER), a novel method for selecting a set of exemplars that is both representative and diverse. The key novelty of SEER is that it formulates exemplar selection as a Knapsack Integer Linear Program. The Knapsack framework provides the flexibility to incorporate diversity constraints that prioritize exemplars with desirable attributes, and capacity constraints that ensure that the prompt size respects the provided capacity budgets. The effectiveness of SEER is demonstrated on FinQA and TAT-QA, two real-world benchmarks for HybridQA, where it outperforms previous exemplar selection methods.

SEER : A Knapsack approach to Exemplar Selection for In-Context HybridQA

Existing MWP solvers employ sequence or binary tree to present the solution expression and decode it from given problem description. However, such structures fail to handle the variants that can be derived via mathematical manipulation, e.g., $(a_1+a_2)*a_3$ and $a_1 * a_3+a_2 * a_3$ can both be possible valid solutions for a same problem but formulated as different expression sequences or trees. The multiple solution variants depicting different possible solving procedures for the same input problem would raise two issues: 1) making it hard for the model to learn the mapping function between the input and output spaces effectively, and 2) wrongly indicating \textit{wrong} when evaluating a valid expression variant. To address these issues, we introduce a unified tree structure to present a solution expression, where the elements are permutable and identical for all the expression variants. We propose a novel non-autoregressive solver, named \textit{MWP-NAS}, to parse the problem and deduce the solution expression based on the unified tree. For evaluating the possible expression variants, we design a path-based metric to evaluate the partial accuracy of expressions of a unified tree. The results from extensive experiments conducted on Math23K and MAWPS demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed MWP-NAS. The codes and checkpoints are available at: \url{https://github.com/mengqunhan/MWP-NAS}.

Non-Autoregressive Math Word Problem Solver with Unified Tree Structure | VIDEO

Efficiently retrieving FAQ questions that match users' intent is essential for online customer service. 
Existing methods aim to fully utilize the dynamic conversation context to enhance the semantic association between the user query and FAQ questions.
However, the conversation context contains noise, e.g., users may click questions they don't like, leading to inaccurate semantics modeling.
To tackle this, we introduce tags of FAQ questions, which can help us eliminate irrelevant information. 
We later integrate them into a reinforcement learning framework and minimize the negative impact of irrelevant information in the dynamic conversation context. 
We experimentally demonstrate our efficiency and effectiveness on conversational FAQ retrieval compared to other baselines.

TRAVEL: Tag-Aware Conversational FAQ Retrieval via Reinforcement Learning

Information-seeking questions in long-form question answering (LFQA) often prove misleading due to ambiguity or false presupposition in the question. While many existing approaches handle misleading questions, they are tailored to limited questions, which are insufficient in a real-world setting with unpredictable input characteristics. In this work, we propose PreWoMe, a unified approach capable of handling any type of information-seeking question. The key idea of PreWoMe involves extracting presuppositions in the question and exploiting them as working memory to generate feedback and action about the question. Our experiment shows that PreWoMe is effective not only in tackling misleading questions but also in handling normal ones, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging presuppositions, feedback, and action for real-world QA settings.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Find-2-Find: Multitask Learning for Anaphora Resolution and Object Localization