In plain words: Questions needing facts from several paragraphs are split into sub-questions, each answered by a simple single-question system, then rescored to pick the answer. Trained on just 400 examples, its sub-questions matched human-written ones, and the system set the best results on a multi-hop test.
Abstract · Multi-hop Reading Comprehension through Question Decomposition and Rescoring
Multi-hop Reading Comprehension (RC) requires reasoning and aggregation across several paragraphs. We propose a system for multi-hop RC that decomposes a compositional question into simpler sub-questions that can be answered by off-the-shelf single-hop RC models. Since annotations for such decomposition are expensive, we recast sub-question generation as a span prediction problem and show that our method, trained using only 400 labeled examples, generates sub-questions that are as effective as human-authored sub-questions. We also introduce a new global rescoring approach that considers each decomposition (i.e. the sub-questions and their answers) to select the best final answer, greatly improving overall performance. Our experiments on HotpotQA show that this approach achieves the state-of-the-art results, while providing explainable evidence for its decision making in the form of sub-questions.
Sewon Min, Victor Zhong, Luke Zettlemoyer, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
arXiv:1906.02916 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Jun 7, 2019 · updated Jun 30, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Published as a conference paper at ACL 2019 (long). Code available at https://github.com/shmsw25/DecompRC