Abstract
Answering complex questions is a time-consuming activity for humans that requires reasoning and integration of information. Recent work on reading comprehension made headway in answering simple questions, but tackling complex questions is still an ongoing research challenge. Conversely, semantic parsers have been successful at handling compositionality, but only when the information resides in a target knowledge-base. In this paper, we present a novel framework for answering broad and complex questions, assuming answering simple questions is possible using a search engine and a reading comprehension model. We propose to decompose complex questions into a sequence of simple questions, and compute the final answer from the sequence of answers. To illustrate the viability of our approach, we create a new dataset of complex questions, ComplexWebQuestions, and present a model that decomposes questions and interacts with the web to compute an answer. We empirically demonstrate that question decomposition improves performance from 20.8 precision@1 to 27.5 precision@1 on this new dataset.
Highlights
Humans often want to answer complex questions that require reasoning over multiple pieces of evidence, e.g., “From what country is the winner of the Australian Open women’s singles 2008?”
We demonstrated that question decomposition substantially improves performance on answering complex questions using two independent reading comprehension (RC) models
In this paper we propose a new framework for answering complex questions that is based on question decomposition and interaction with the web
Summary
Humans often want to answer complex questions that require reasoning over multiple pieces of evidence, e.g., “From what country is the winner of the Australian Open women’s singles 2008?”. Answering such questions in broad domains can be quite onerous for humans, because it requires searching and integrating information from multiple sources. Q :What city is the birthplace of the author of ‘Without end’, and hosted Euro 2012?. Q3 : Birthplace of Adam Zagajewski q4 : What cities hosted Euro 2012? A :({Cardiff} ∪ {Lviv}) ∩ {Warsaw, Kiev, Lviv, ...}={Lviv}. RC assumes documents with the information relevant for the answer are available – but when questions are complex, even retrieving the documents can be difficult
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