Do I have the Knowledge to Answer? Investigating Answerability of Knowledge Base Questions

Mayur Patidar, Prayushi Faldu, Avinash Singh, Lovekesh Vig, Indrajit Bhattacharya, Mausam


Abstract
When answering natural language questions over knowledge bases, missing facts, incomplete schema and limited scope naturally lead to many questions being unanswerable. While answerability has been explored in other QA settings, it has not been studied for QA over knowledge bases (KBQA). We create GrailQAbility, a new benchmark KBQA dataset with unanswerability, by first identifying various forms of KB incompleteness that make questions unanswerable, and then systematically adapting GrailQA (a popular KBQA dataset with only answerable questions). Experimenting with three state-of-the-art KBQA models, we find that all three models suffer a drop in performance even after suitable adaptation for unanswerable questions. In addition, these often detect unanswerability for wrong reasons and find specific forms of unanswerability particularly difficult to handle. This underscores the need for further research in making KBQA systems robust to unanswerability.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.576
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10341–10357
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.576
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.576
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mayur Patidar, Prayushi Faldu, Avinash Singh, Lovekesh Vig, Indrajit Bhattacharya, and Mausam. 2023. Do I have the Knowledge to Answer? Investigating Answerability of Knowledge Base Questions. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10341–10357, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Do I have the Knowledge to Answer? Investigating Answerability of Knowledge Base Questions (Patidar et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.576.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.576.mp4