Neural Program Induction for KBQA Without Gold Programs or Query Annotations

Neural Program Induction for KBQA Without Gold Programs or Query Annotations

Ghulam Ahmed Ansari, Amrita Saha, Vishwajeet Kumar, Mohan Bhambhani, Karthik Sankaranarayanan, Soumen Chakrabarti

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4890-4896. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/679

Neural Program Induction (NPI) is a paradigm for decomposing high-level tasks such as complex question-answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) into executable programs by employing neural models. Typically, this involves two key phases: i) inferring input program variables from the high-level task description, and ii) generating the correct program sequence involving these variables. Here we focus on NPI for Complex KBQA with only the final answer as supervision, and not gold programs. This raises major challenges; namely, i) noisy query annotation in the absence of any supervision can lead to catastrophic forgetting while learning, ii) reward becomes extremely sparse owing to the noise. To deal with these, we propose a noise-resilient NPI model, Stable Sparse Reward based Programmer (SSRP) that evades noise-induced instability through continual retrospection and its comparison with current learning behavior. On complex KBQA datasets, SSRP performs at par with hand-crafted rule-based models when provided with gold program input, and in the noisy settings outperforms state-of-the-art models by a significant margin even with a noisier query annotator.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Question Answering
Machine Learning: Deep Learning
Machine Learning Applications: Applications of Reinforcement Learning