# Multi-Task Learning for Conversational Question Answering over a Large-Scale Knowledge Base

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.05069 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05069/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Multi-Task Learning in Natural Language Processing: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09138/) (2021)
- [Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06688/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Multi-task Learning in Natural Language Processing: Regarding Task Relatedness and Training Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03508/) (2022)
- [Conversational Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00874/) (2021)
- [Conversational Question Answering on Heterogeneous Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11677/) (2022)
- [Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs with Transformer and Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01569/) (2021)
- [ProQA: Structural Prompt-based Pre-training for Unified Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04040/) (2022)
- [Reinforcement Learning from Reformulations in Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04850/) (2021)
- [UNIQORN: Unified Question Answering over RDF Knowledge Graphs and Natural Language Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08614/) (2021)
- [A Two-Stage Approach towards Generalization in Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05825/) (2021)
- [ParaQA: A Question Answering Dataset with Paraphrase Responses for Single-Turn Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07771/) (2021)
- [Beyond NED: Fast and Effective Search Space Reduction for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08597/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Crosswords: Geometric Knowledge Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01290/) (2023)
- [Context Transformer with Stacked Pointer Networks for Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07766/) (2021)
- [Structured Context and High-Coverage Grammar for Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00269/) (2021)
- [Semantic Parsing for Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12217/) (2023)
- [Compositional Generalization in Multilingual Semantic Parsing over Wikidata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03509/) (2021)
- [Crake: Causal-Enhanced Table-Filler for Question Answering over Large Scale Knowledge Base](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03680/) (2022)
- [A Graph-guided Multi-round Retrieval Method for Conversational Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08443/) (2021)
- [Interactive Question Answering Systems: Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01621/) (2022)
- [Robust Training for Conversational Question Answering Models with Reinforced Reformulation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13505/) (2023)
- [GETT-QA: Graph Embedding based T2T Transformer for Knowledge Graph Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13284/) (2023)
- [GraphWOZ: Dialogue Management with Conversational Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12852/) (2022)
- [History Semantic Graph Enhanced Conversational KBQA with Temporal Information Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06872/) (2023)
- [Learning to Select the Relevant History Turns in Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02294/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Artificial Intelligence for Source Code: A Dialogue Systems Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04847/) (2022)
- [Adjacency List Oriented Relational Fact Extraction via Adaptive Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01559/) (2021)
- [Semantic Answer Type Prediction using BERT: IAI at the ISWC SMART Task 2020](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06714/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Representation Learning for Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04373/) (2022)
- [A Transformer-Based User Satisfaction Prediction for Proactive Interaction Mechanism in DuerOS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03817/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the problem of conversational question answering over a large-scale knowledge base. To handle huge entity vocabulary of a large-scale knowledge base, recent neural semantic parsing based approaches usually decompose the task into several subtasks and then solve them sequentially, which leads to following issues: 1) errors in earlier subtasks will be propagated and negatively affect downstream ones; and 2) each subtask cannot naturally share supervision signals with others. To tackle these issues, we propose an innovative multi-task learning framework where a pointer-equipped semantic parsing model is designed to resolve coreference in conversations, and naturally empower joint learning with a novel type-aware entity detection model. The proposed framework thus enables shared supervisions and alleviates the effect of error propagation. Experiments on a large-scale conversational question answering dataset containing 1.6M question answering pairs over 12.8M entities show that the proposed framework improves overall F1 score from 67% to 79% compared with previous state-of-the-art work.