Faithful Temporal Question Answering over Heterogeneous Sources

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Jia, Zhen, Christmann, Philipp, Weikum, Gerhard
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866911782992347136
author Jia, Zhen
Christmann, Philipp
Weikum, Gerhard
author_facet Jia, Zhen
Christmann, Philipp
Weikum, Gerhard
contents Temporal question answering (QA) involves time constraints, with phrases such as "... in 2019" or "... before COVID". In the former, time is an explicit condition, in the latter it is implicit. State-of-the-art methods have limitations along three dimensions. First, with neural inference, time constraints are merely soft-matched, giving room to invalid or inexplicable answers. Second, questions with implicit time are poorly supported. Third, answers come from a single source: either a knowledge base (KB) or a text corpus. We propose a temporal QA system that addresses these shortcomings. First, it enforces temporal constraints for faithful answering with tangible evidence. Second, it properly handles implicit questions. Third, it operates over heterogeneous sources, covering KB, text and web tables in a unified manner. The method has three stages: (i) understanding the question and its temporal conditions, (ii) retrieving evidence from all sources, and (iii) faithfully answering the question. As implicit questions are sparse in prior benchmarks, we introduce a principled method for generating diverse questions. Experiments show superior performance over a suite of baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_15400
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Faithful Temporal Question Answering over Heterogeneous Sources
Jia, Zhen
Christmann, Philipp
Weikum, Gerhard
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Temporal question answering (QA) involves time constraints, with phrases such as "... in 2019" or "... before COVID". In the former, time is an explicit condition, in the latter it is implicit. State-of-the-art methods have limitations along three dimensions. First, with neural inference, time constraints are merely soft-matched, giving room to invalid or inexplicable answers. Second, questions with implicit time are poorly supported. Third, answers come from a single source: either a knowledge base (KB) or a text corpus. We propose a temporal QA system that addresses these shortcomings. First, it enforces temporal constraints for faithful answering with tangible evidence. Second, it properly handles implicit questions. Third, it operates over heterogeneous sources, covering KB, text and web tables in a unified manner. The method has three stages: (i) understanding the question and its temporal conditions, (ii) retrieving evidence from all sources, and (iii) faithfully answering the question. As implicit questions are sparse in prior benchmarks, we introduce a principled method for generating diverse questions. Experiments show superior performance over a suite of baselines.
title Faithful Temporal Question Answering over Heterogeneous Sources
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15400