# Exploiting Reasoning Chains for Multi-hop Science Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.02905 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02905/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02235/) (2021)
- [UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00700/) (2020)
- [COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05317/) (2019)
- [QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06378/) (2021)
- [FreeLB: Enhanced Adversarial Training for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11764/) (2019)
- [QASC: A Dataset for Question Answering via Sentence Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11473/) (2019)
- [Retrieving and Reading: A Comprehensive Survey on Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00774/) (2021)
- [Answering Complex Open-Domain Questions with Multi-Hop Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12756/) (2020)
- [Learning to Retrieve Reasoning Paths over Wikipedia Graph for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10470/) (2019)
- [Scalable Multi-Hop Relational Reasoning for Knowledge-Aware Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00646/) (2020)
- [Transforming Question Answering Datasets Into Natural Language Inference Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02922/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Graph Network for Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03631/) (2019)
- [Interactive Path Reasoning on Graph for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00194/) (2020)
- [Dynamically Fused Graph Network for Multi-hop Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06933/) (2019)
- [Quick and (not so) Dirty: Unsupervised Selection of Justification Sentences for Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07176/) (2019)
- [Select, Answer and Explain: Interpretable Multi-hop Reading Comprehension over Multiple Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00484/) (2019)
- [IIRC: A Dataset of Incomplete Information Reading Comprehension Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07127/) (2020)
- [NeurIPS 2020 EfficientQA Competition: Systems, Analyses and Lessons Learned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00133/) (2021)
- [Revealing the Importance of Semantic Retrieval for Machine Reading at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08041/) (2019)
- [AMR Parsing via Graph-Sequence Iterative Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05572/) (2020)
- [Connecting the Dots: A Knowledgeable Path Generator for Commonsense Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00691/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [ScienceWorld: Is your Agent Smarter than a 5th Grader?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07540/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Graphs (GraphRAG)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00309/) (2024)
- [Progressive-Hint Prompting Improves Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09797/) (2023)
- [Rationale-Augmented Ensembles in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00747/) (2022)
- [Don't Just Say "I don't know"! Self-aligning Large Language Models for Responding to Unknown Questions with Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15062/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Ethical Explanations of Large Language Models through Iterative Symbolic Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00745/) (2024)
- [DocHop-QA: Towards Multi-Hop Reasoning over Multimodal Document Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15851/) (2025)
- [ConReader: Exploring Implicit Relations in Contracts for Contract Clause Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08697/) (2022)
- [HOP, UNION, GENERATE: Explainable Multi-hop Reasoning without Rationale Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14237/) (2023)
- [DF-RAG: Query-Aware Diversity for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17212/) (2026)
- [ConTReGen: Context-driven Tree-structured Retrieval for Open-domain Long-form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15511/) (2024)
- [DepWiGNN: A Depth-wise Graph Neural Network for Multi-hop Spatial Reasoning in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12557/) (2023)
- [Multi-Hop Reasoning for Question Answering with Hyperbolic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03612/) (2025)
- [When Guessing is Rewarded: Rethinking Language Model Evaluation with Distributional Uncertainty Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04302/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel Chain Guided Retriever-reader (tt CGR) framework to model the reasoning chain for multi-hop Science Question Answering. Our framework is capable of performing explainable reasoning without the need of any corpus-specific annotations, such as the ground-truth reasoning chain, or human-annotated entity mentions. Specifically, we first generate reasoning chains from a semantic graph constructed by Abstract Meaning Representation of retrieved evidence facts. A textitChain-aware loss, concerning both local and global chain information, is also designed to enable the generated chains to serve as distant supervision signals for training the retriever, where reinforcement learning is also adopted to maximize the utility of the reasoning chains. Our framework allows the retriever to capture step-by-step clues of the entire reasoning process, which is not only shown to be effective on two challenging multi-hop Science QA tasks, namely OpenBookQA and ARC-Challenge, but also favors explainability.