This paper presents ParaQA, a question answering (QA) dataset with multiple paraphrased responses for single-turn conversation over knowledge graphs (KG). The dataset was created using a semi-automated framework for generating diverse paraphrasing of the answers using techniques such as back-translation. The existing datasets for conversational question answering over KGs (single-turn/multi-turn) focus on question paraphrasing and provide only up to one answer verbalization. However, ParaQA contains 5000 question-answer pairs with a minimum of two and a maximum of eight unique paraphrased responses for each question. We complement the dataset with baseline models and illustrate the advantage of having multiple paraphrased answers through commonly used metrics such as BLEU and METEOR. The ParaQA dataset is publicly available on a persistent URI for broader usage and adaptation in the research community.
Neural semantic parsing approaches have been widely used for Question Answering (QA) systems over knowledge graphs. Such methods provide the flexibility to handle QA datasets with complex queries and a large number of entities. In this work, we propose a novel framework named CARTON, which performs multi-task semantic parsing for handling the problem of conversational question answering over a large-scale knowledge graph. Our framework consists of a stack of pointer networks as an extension of a context transformer model for parsing the input question and the dialog history. The framework generates a sequence of actions that can be executed on the knowledge graph. We evaluate CARTON on a standard dataset for complex sequential question answering on which CARTON outperforms all baselines. Specifically, we observe performance improvements in F1-score on eight out of ten question types compared to the previous state of the art. For logical reasoning questions, an improvement of 11 absolute points is reached.
In this paper, we introduce the MLM (Multiple Languages and Modalities) dataset - a new resource to train and evaluate multitask systems on samples in multiple modalities and three languages. The generation process and inclusion of semantic data provide a resource that further tests the ability for multitask systems to learn relationships between entities. The dataset is designed for researchers and developers who build applications that perform multiple tasks on data encountered on the web and in digital archives. A second version of MLM provides a geo-representative subset of the data with weighted samples for countries of the European Union. We demonstrate the value of the resource in developing novel applications in the digital humanities with a motivating use case and specify a benchmark set of tasks to retrieve modalities and locate entities in the dataset. Evaluation of baseline multitask and single task systems on the full and geo-representative versions of MLM demonstrate the challenges of generalising on diverse data. In addition to the digital humanities, we expect the resource to contribute to research in multimodal representation learning, location estimation, and scene understanding.