Skeleton parsing for complex question answering over knowledge bases

Answering complex questions involving multiple relations over knowledge bases is a challenging task. Many previous works rely on dependency parsing. However, errors in dependency parsing would influence their performance, in particular for long complex questions. In this paper, we propose a novel skeleton grammar to represent the high-level structure of a complex question. This lightweight formalism and its BERT-based parsing algorithm help to improve the downstream dependency parsing. To show the effectiveness of skeleton, we develop two question answering approaches: skeleton-based semantic parsing (called SSP) and skeleton-based information retrieval (called SIR). In SSP, skeleton helps to improve structured query generation. In SIR, skeleton helps to improve path ranking. Experimental results show that, thanks to skeletons, our approaches achieve state-of-the-art results on three datasets: LC-QuAD 1.0, GraphQuestions, and ComplexWebQuestions 1.1.