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Knowledge Based Question Answering System

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15 views17 pages

Knowledge Based Question Answering System

Uploaded by

rajputakashchand4
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Knowledge based Question

answering System
Knowledge-based question answering (KB-QA)

• is a paradigm in question-answering systems where a natural language


question is answered by querying a structured database or knowledge base
(KB) instead of relying on unstructured text.

• This approach leverages the structured data in a knowledge base, which


typically contains entities (e.g., people, places, organizations) and
relationships (e.g., birthplace, located in, works for) in a format that the
system can interpret and retrieve answers from with high accuracy.
Entity Linking,

• It explains how to associate a mention in text with a real-world entity in


an ontology, like a structured database, which is essential for knowledge-
based question answering (QA).

• This section discusses how systems identify specific entities (like people,
locations, organizations) within text and link these mentions to
corresponding records in a database.

• For fact-based QA, Wikipedia is often the preferred ontology, where each
unique Wikipedia page acts as an identifier for a specific entity.
Entity linking in this context has two main parts

• Mention Detection: Identifying phrases or words (mentions) in


the text that may refer to real-world entities.

• Mention Disambiguation: Deciding which specific entity each


mention corresponds to, especially in cases where a mention may
refer to multiple entities (e.g., “Washington” could mean the U.S.
state, the capital city, or George Washington).
Linking Based on Anchor Dictionaries and Web Graph

• A classic method for entity linking uses anchor dictionaries and graph
structures from Wikipedia, as implemented in the TAGME algorithm.
Here’s how this approach works:
Anchor Dictionaries
• An anchor dictionary is created by analyzing hyperlinks within
Wikipedia articles, as hyperlinks often serve as anchors for referring to
other pages.

• For instance, the phrase “Stanford University” might serve as a


hyperlink text or anchor to Stanford’s Wikipedia page.

• By using all the phrases that hyperlink to each Wikipedia page, an


anchor dictionary is built.

• This dictionary lists each possible entity (Wikipedia page) and the
phrases commonly used to link to it.
Each anchor in this dictionary has:

• Frequency: The number of times it appears in Wikipedia as a link


(link frequency) or in any context (total frequency).

• Link Probability: Calculated as the ratio of link frequency to total


frequency. This probability indicates the likelihood that an anchor
refers to a specific entity when it appears in a text.
Mention Detection
• For a new text, all potential entity mentions are found by
looking up sequences of up to six tokens (words) in the anchor
dictionary.

• The mention detection step often eliminates low-probability


links (phrases with low link probabilities or high ambiguity).

• For example, “Ada Lovelace” would likely have a high link


probability to a Wikipedia page about the mathematician, while
“born” (from the query “When was Ada Lovelace born?”) would
likely be ignored as it has a very low link probability.
Mention Disambiguation
• If an anchor or mention points to only one entity, linking is
straightforward. However, many mentions are ambiguous, with
multiple possible meanings. TAGME uses two main factors for
resolving ambiguity:

• Prior Probability: The likelihood of an anchor referring to a particular


entity, calculated as the ratio of the anchor’s links to that entity over its
total link occurrences.
• Relatedness/Coherence: The relationship between an entity candidate and other
entities in the question or context.

• This coherence is measured by how many Wikipedia pages link to both entities,
indicating a strong connection.

• For instance, the word "Yuan" could refer to the Chinese currency, a dynasty, or a
person’s name.

• But in the context of “Chinese Dynasty,” the coherence score would prioritize
linking to the "Yuan Dynasty" page.
2. Neural Graph-Based Linking

• Modern methods use neural networks to perform entity linking by


encoding both the mention (a phrase in the text) and potential
entities as embeddings (dense vectors), then computing a
similarity score.

• This approach, exemplified by the ELQ linking algorithm,


includes several key steps:
• Above diagram shows the ELQ linking algorithm of

• which is given a question q and a set of candidate entities from


Wikipedia with associated Wikipedia text, and outputs tuples (e,ms
,me) of entity id, mention start, and mention end.
Mention Detection

• The system encodes each token in a question using a model like


BERT.

• Then, it computes probabilities for each potential span


(sequence of tokens) to determine if it’s an entity mention.

• Each token receives a start and end probability, which helps


identify entity spans within the question.
Entity Encoding and Linking

• Each Wikipedia entity is pre-encoded into a dense vector using its


page information (e.g., title and first 128 tokens).

• This encoding is stored, allowing the model to search through


these vectors when a question arises.
Entity Encoding and Linking

• For each mention span identified in the question, the system


computes an embedding by averaging the BERT embeddings of
each token in the span.

• It then calculates similarity scores (dot products) between the


span embedding and all pre-computed entity embeddings.

• This process results in a ranked list of entities, with the highest


similarity score indicating the most likely entity match.
Training and Loss Functions

• The ELQ algorithm is trained using datasets with questions


annotated with entity boundaries and links, such as
WebQuestionsSP.

• The loss function for training combines two parts:


• Mention Detection Loss: A binary cross-entropy loss indicating if
a span is an entity.

• Entity Linking Loss: This loss component penalizes incorrect


matches between detected mentions and entities.

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