EMNLP 2021main81 citations

Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases

Rajarshi Das, Manzil Zaheer, Dung Thai, Ameya Godbole, Ethan Perez, Jay Yoon Lee, Lizhen Tan, Lazaros Polymenakos

Abstract

It is often challenging to solve a complex problem from scratch, but much easier if we can access other similar problems with their solutions — a paradigm known as case-based reasoning (CBR). We propose a neuro-symbolic CBR approach (CBR-KBQA) for question answering over large knowledge bases. CBR-KBQA consists of a nonparametric memory that stores cases (question and logical forms) and a parametric model that can generate a logical form for a new question by retrieving cases that are relevant to it. On several KBQA datasets that contain complex questions, CBR-KBQA achieves competitive performance. For example, on the CWQ dataset, CBR-KBQA outperforms the current state of the art by 11% on accuracy. Furthermore, we show that CBR-KBQA is capable of using new cases without any further training: by incorporating a few human-labeled examples in the case memory, CBR-KBQA is able to successfully generate logical forms containing unseen KB entities as well as relations.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{das-etal-2021-case,
    title = "Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases",
    author = "Das, Rajarshi  and
      Zaheer, Manzil  and
      Thai, Dung  and
      Godbole, Ameya  and
      Perez, Ethan  and
      Lee, Jay Yoon  and
      Tan, Lizhen  and
      Polymenakos, Lazaros  and
      McCallum, Andrew",
    editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine  and
      Huang, Xuanjing  and
      Specia, Lucia  and
      Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.755/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.755",
    pages = "9594--9611"
}
Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases · EMNLP 2021