# ComQA:Compositional Question Answering via Hierarchical Graph Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06400 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06400/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01261/) (2018)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00161/) (2019)
- [How Much Knowledge Can You Pack Into the Parameters of a Language Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08910/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning on Graphs: Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05584/) (2017)
- [Dataset Cartography: Mapping and Diagnosing Datasets with Training Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10795/) (2020)
- [Graph Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05679/) (2018)
- [Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01603/) (2016)
- [SearchQA: A New Q&A Dataset Augmented with Context from a Search Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05179/) (2017)
- [Named Entity Recognition with Bidirectional LSTM-CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08308/) (2015)
- [Constructing Datasets for Multi-hop Reading Comprehension Across Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06481/) (2017)
- [QANet: Combining Local Convolution with Global Self-Attention for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09541/) (2018)
- [Graph Convolution over Pruned Dependency Trees Improves Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10185/) (2018)
- [Quasar: Datasets for Question Answering by Search and Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03904/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [ChiQA: A Large Scale Image-based Real-World Question Answering Dataset for Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03030/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Multi-hop Machine Reading Comprehension Datasets and Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04070/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Multi-hop Machine Reading Comprehension Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04072/) (2022)
- [Intent-calibrated Self-training for Answer Selection in Open-domain Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06703/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the development of deep learning techniques and large scale datasets, the question answering (QA) systems have been quickly improved, providing more accurate and satisfying answers. However, current QA systems either focus on the sentence-level answer, i.e., answer selection, or phrase-level answer, i.e., machine reading comprehension. How to produce compositional answers has not been throughout investigated. In compositional question answering, the systems should assemble several supporting evidence from the document to generate the final answer, which is more difficult than sentence-level or phrase-level QA. In this paper, we present a large-scale compositional question answering dataset containing more than 120k human-labeled questions. The answer in this dataset is composed of discontiguous sentences in the corresponding document. To tackle the ComQA problem, we proposed a hierarchical graph neural networks, which represents the document from the low-level word to the high-level sentence. We also devise a question selection and node selection task for pre-training. Our proposed model achieves a significant improvement over previous machine reading comprehension methods and pre-training methods. Codes and dataset can be found at urlhttps://github.com/benywon/ComQA.