Complex question answering often requires finding a reasoning chain that consists of multiple evidence pieces. Current approaches incorporate the strengths of structured knowledge and unstructured text, assuming text corpora is semi-structured. Building on dense retrieval methods, we propose a new multi-step retrieval approach (BeamDR) that iteratively forms an evidence chain through beam search in dense representations. When evaluated on multi-hop question answering, BeamDR is competitive to state-of-the-art systems, without using any semi-structured information. Through query composition in dense space, BeamDR captures the implicit relationships between evidence in the reasoning chain. The code is available at https:\/\/github.com\/ henryzhao5852\/BeamDR.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Complex question answering often requires finding a reasoning chain that consists of multiple evidence pieces. Current approaches incorporate the strengths of structured knowledge and unstructured text, assuming text corpora is semi-structured. Building on dense retrieval methods, we propose a new multi-step retrieval approach (BeamDR) that iteratively forms an evidence chain through beam search in dense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13563],"msr-publication-type":[193724],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-field-of-study":[255250,256330,249193,256327,246691,256333,248503,248338,256081,249019],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-750151","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-data-platform-analytics","msr-locale-en_us","msr-field-of-study-beam-search","msr-field-of-study-chain-algebraic-topology","msr-field-of-study-code-cryptography","msr-field-of-study-complex-question","msr-field-of-study-computer-science","msr-field-of-study-current-mathematics","msr-field-of-study-information-retrieval","msr-field-of-study-question-answering","msr-field-of-study-space-commercial-competition","msr-field-of-study-text-corpus"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2021-4-12","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"arXiv","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/2104.05883.pdf","label_id":"243132","label":0},{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/export.arxiv.org\/abs\/2104.05883","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Chen Zhao","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Chenyan Xiong","user_id":37821,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Chenyan Xiong"},{"type":"text","value":"Jordan L. 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