The usage and amount of information available on the internet increase over the past decade. This digitization leads to the need for automated answering system to extract fruitful information from redundant and transitional knowledge sources. Such systems are designed to cater the most prominent answer from this giant knowledge source to the user query using natural language understanding (NLU) and thus eminently depends on the Question-answering(QA) field. Question answering involves but not limited to the steps like mapping of user question to pertinent query, retrieval of relevant information, finding the best suitable answer from the retrieved information etc. The current improvement of deep learning models evince compelling performance improvement in all these tasks. In this review work, the research directions of QA field are analyzed based on the type of question, answer type, source of evidence-answer, and modeling approach. This detailing followed by open challenges of the field like automatic question generation, similarity detection and, low resource availability for a language. In the end, a survey of available datasets and evaluation measures is presented.
Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a combination of medical artificial intelligence and popular VQA challenges. Given a medical image and a clinically relevant question in natural language, the medical VQA system is expected to predict a plausible and convincing answer. Although the general-domain VQA has been extensively studied, the medical VQA still needs specific investigation and exploration due to its task features. In the first part of this survey, we cover and discuss the publicly available medical VQA datasets up to date about the data source, data quantity, and task feature. In the second part, we review the approaches used in medical VQA tasks. In the last part, we analyze some medical-specific challenges for the field and discuss future research directions.
Recommender system is one of the most important information services on today's Internet. Recently, graph neural networks have become the new state-of-the-art approach of recommender systems. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature in graph neural network-based recommender systems. We first introduce the background and the history of the development of both recommender systems and graph neural networks. For recommender systems, in general, there are four aspects for categorizing existing works: stage, scenario, objective, and application. For graph neural networks, the existing methods consist of two categories, spectral models and spatial ones. We then discuss the motivation of applying graph neural networks into recommender systems, mainly consisting of the high-order connectivity, the structural property of data, and the enhanced supervision signal. We then systematically analyze the challenges in graph construction, embedding propagation/aggregation, model optimization, and computation efficiency. Afterward and primarily, we provide a comprehensive overview of a multitude of existing works of graph neural network-based recommender systems, following the taxonomy above. Finally, we raise discussions on the open problems and promising future directions of this area. We summarize the representative papers along with their codes repositories in //github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/GNN-Recommender-Systems.
Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) aims to answer a question over a knowledge base (KB). Recently, a large number of studies focus on semantically or syntactically complicated questions. In this paper, we elaborately summarize the typical challenges and solutions for complex KBQA. We begin with introducing the background about the KBQA task. Next, we present the two mainstream categories of methods for complex KBQA, namely semantic parsing-based (SP-based) methods and information retrieval-based (IR-based) methods. We then review the advanced methods comprehensively from the perspective of the two categories. Specifically, we explicate their solutions to the typical challenges. Finally, we conclude and discuss some promising directions for future research.
Recent developments in pre-trained neural language modeling have led to leaps in accuracy on commonsense question-answering benchmarks. However, there is increasing concern that models overfit to specific tasks, without learning to utilize external knowledge or perform general semantic reasoning. In contrast, zero-shot evaluations have shown promise as a more robust measure of a model's general reasoning abilities. In this paper, we propose a novel neuro-symbolic framework for zero-shot question answering across commonsense tasks. Guided by a set of hypotheses, the framework studies how to transform various pre-existing knowledge resources into a form that is most effective for pre-training models. We vary the set of language models, training regimes, knowledge sources, and data generation strategies, and measure their impact across tasks. Extending on prior work, we devise and compare four constrained distractor-sampling strategies. We provide empirical results across five commonsense question-answering tasks with data generated from five external knowledge resources. We show that, while an individual knowledge graph is better suited for specific tasks, a global knowledge graph brings consistent gains across different tasks. In addition, both preserving the structure of the task as well as generating fair and informative questions help language models learn more effectively.
The goal of text generation is to make machines express in human language. It is one of the most important yet challenging tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Since 2014, various neural encoder-decoder models pioneered by Seq2Seq have been proposed to achieve the goal by learning to map input text to output text. However, the input text alone often provides limited knowledge to generate the desired output, so the performance of text generation is still far from satisfaction in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, researchers have considered incorporating various forms of knowledge beyond the input text into the generation models. This research direction is known as knowledge-enhanced text generation. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of the research on knowledge enhanced text generation over the past five years. The main content includes two parts: (i) general methods and architectures for integrating knowledge into text generation; (ii) specific techniques and applications according to different forms of knowledge data. This survey can have broad audiences, researchers and practitioners, in academia and industry.
Due to the significance and value in human-computer interaction and natural language processing, task-oriented dialog systems are attracting more and more attention in both academic and industrial communities. In this paper, we survey recent advances and challenges in an issue-specific manner. We discuss three critical topics for task-oriented dialog systems: (1) improving data efficiency to facilitate dialog system modeling in low-resource settings, (2) modeling multi-turn dynamics for dialog policy learning to achieve better task-completion performance, and (3) integrating domain ontology knowledge into the dialog model in both pipeline and end-to-end models. We also review the recent progresses in dialog evaluation and some widely-used corpora. We believe that this survey can shed a light on future research in task-oriented dialog systems.
The Visual Question Answering (VQA) task combines challenges for processing data with both Visual and Linguistic processing, to answer basic `common sense' questions about given images. Given an image and a question in natural language, the VQA system tries to find the correct answer to it using visual elements of the image and inference gathered from textual questions. In this survey, we cover and discuss the recent datasets released in the VQA domain dealing with various types of question-formats and enabling robustness of the machine-learning models. Next, we discuss about new deep learning models that have shown promising results over the VQA datasets. At the end, we present and discuss some of the results computed by us over the vanilla VQA models, Stacked Attention Network and the VQA Challenge 2017 winner model. We also provide the detailed analysis along with the challenges and future research directions.
Visual question answering (VQA) demands simultaneous comprehension of both the image visual content and natural language questions. In some cases, the reasoning needs the help of common sense or general knowledge which usually appear in the form of text. Current methods jointly embed both the visual information and the textual feature into the same space. However, how to model the complex interactions between the two different modalities is not an easy task. In contrast to struggling on multimodal feature fusion, in this paper, we propose to unify all the input information by natural language so as to convert VQA into a machine reading comprehension problem. With this transformation, our method not only can tackle VQA datasets that focus on observation based questions, but can also be naturally extended to handle knowledge-based VQA which requires to explore large-scale external knowledge base. It is a step towards being able to exploit large volumes of text and natural language processing techniques to address VQA problem. Two types of models are proposed to deal with open-ended VQA and multiple-choice VQA respectively. We evaluate our models on three VQA benchmarks. The comparable performance with the state-of-the-art demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Structured queries expressed in languages (such as SQL, SPARQL, or XQuery) offer a convenient and explicit way for users to express their information needs for a number of tasks. In this work, we present an approach to answer these directly over text data without storing results in a database. We specifically look at the case of knowledge bases where queries are over entities and the relations between them. Our approach combines distributed query answering (e.g. Triple Pattern Fragments) with models built for extractive question answering. Importantly, by applying distributed querying answering we are able to simplify the model learning problem. We train models for a large portion (572) of the relations within Wikidata and achieve an average 0.70 F1 measure across all models. We also present a systematic method to construct the necessary training data for this task from knowledge graphs and describe a prototype implementation.
We propose the task of free-form and open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a natural language question about the image, the task is to provide an accurate natural language answer. Mirroring real-world scenarios, such as helping the visually impaired, both the questions and answers are open-ended. Visual questions selectively target different areas of an image, including background details and underlying context. As a result, a system that succeeds at VQA typically needs a more detailed understanding of the image and complex reasoning than a system producing generic image captions. Moreover, VQA is amenable to automatic evaluation, since many open-ended answers contain only a few words or a closed set of answers that can be provided in a multiple-choice format. We provide a dataset containing ~0.25M images, ~0.76M questions, and ~10M answers (www.visualqa.org), and discuss the information it provides. Numerous baselines and methods for VQA are provided and compared with human performance. Our VQA demo is available on CloudCV (//cloudcv.org/vqa).