Heterogeneous-Graph Reasoning With Context Paraphrase for Commonsense Question Answering

Commonsense question answering (CQA) generally means that the machine uses its mastered commonsense to answer questions without relevant background material, which is a challenging task in natural language processing. Existing methods focus on retrieving relevant subgraphs from knowledge graphs based on key entities and designing complex graph neural networks to perform reasoning over the subgraphs. However, they have the following problems: i) the nested entities in key entities lead to the introduction of irrelevant knowledge; ii) the QA context is not well integrated with the subgraphs; and iii) insufficient context knowledge hinders subgraph nodes understanding. In this paper, we present a heterogeneous-graph reasoning with context paraphrase method (HCP), which introduces the paraphrase knowledge from the dictionary into key entity recognition and subgraphs construction, and effectively fuses QA context and subgraphs during the encoding phase of the pre-trained language model (PTLM). Specifically, HCP filters the nested entities through the dictionary's vocabulary and constructs the Heterogeneous Path-Paraphrase (HPP) graph by connecting the paraphrase descriptions ^{1 1}

The paraphrase descriptions are English explanations of words or phrases in WordNet and Wiktionary.

with the key entity nodes in the subgraphs. Then, by constructing the visible matrices in the PTLM encoding phase, we fuse the QA context representation into the HPP graph. Finally, to get the answer, we perform reasoning on the HPP graph by Mask Self-Attention. Experimental results on CommonsenseQA and OpenBookQA show that fusing QA context with HPP graph in the encoding stage and enhancing the HPP graph representation by using context paraphrase can improve the machine's commonsense reasoning ability.