Multihop Question Answering is a complex Natural Language Processing task that requires multiple steps of reasoning to find the correct answer to a given question. Previous research has explored the use of models based on Graph Neural Networks for tackling this task. Various architectures have been proposed, including Relational Graph Convolutional Networks (RGCN). For these many node types and relations between them have been introduced, such as simple entity co-occurrences, modelling coreferences, or "reasoning paths" from questions to answers via intermediary entities. Nevertheless, a thoughtful analysis on which relations, node types, embeddings and architecture are the most beneficial for this task is still missing. In this paper we explore a number of RGCN-based Multihop QA models, graph relations, and node embeddings, and empirically explore the influence of each on Multihop QA performance on the WikiHop dataset.

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), similarly to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), are typically based on two main operations - spatial and point-wise convolutions. In the context of GCNs, differently from CNNs, a pre-determined spatial operator based on the graph Laplacian is often chosen, allowing only the point-wise operations to be learnt. However, learning a meaningful spatial operator is critical for developing more expressive GCNs for improved performance. In this paper we propose pathGCN, a novel approach to learn the spatial operator from random paths on the graph. We analyze the convergence of our method and its difference from existing GCNs. Furthermore, we discuss several options of combining our learnt spatial operator with point-wise convolutions. Our extensive experiments on numerous datasets suggest that by properly learning both the spatial and point-wise convolutions, phenomena like over-smoothing can be inherently avoided, and new state-of-the-art performance is achieved.