Knowledge Guided Text Retrieval and Reading for Open Domain Question Answering

This paper presents a general approach for open-domain question answering (QA) that models interactions between paragraphs using structural information from a knowledge base. We first describe how to construct a graph of passages from a large corpus, where the relations are either from the knowledge base or the internal structure of Wikipedia. We then introduce a reading comprehension model which takes this graph as an input, to better model relationships across pairs of paragraphs. This approach consistently outperforms competitive baselines in three open-domain QA datasets, WebQuestions, Natural Questions and TriviaQA, improving the pipeline-based state-of-the-art by 3--13%.