Recent years have witnessed much interest in temporal reasoning over knowledge graphs (KG) for complex question answering (QA), but there remains a substantial gap in human capabilities. We explore how to generalize relational graph convolutional networks (RGCN) for temporal KGQA. Specifically, we propose a novel, intuitive and interpretable scheme to modulate the messages passed through a KG edge during convolution, based on the relevance of its associated time period to the question. We also introduce a gating device to predict if the answer to a complex temporal question is likely to be a KG entity or time and use this prediction to guide our scoring mechanism. We evaluate the resulting system, which we call TwiRGCN, on TimeQuestions, a recently released, challenging dataset for multi-hop complex temporal QA. We show that TwiRGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems on this dataset across diverse question types. Notably, TwiRGCN improves accuracy by 9--10 percentage points for the most difficult ordinal and implicit question types.

So a machine can now not only demolish you at chess or devastate you in Jeopardy, it can also outwit you on Question Time. Last week, in a public debate in San Francisco, IBM pitted its Project Debater software program against human opponents, including Noa Ovadia, Israel's national debating champion in 2016. Each participant had four minutes in which to make an opening statement, followed by a four-minute rebuttal and a two-minute conclusion. Drawing on a library of hundreds of millions of newspaper articles and academic papers, and some pre-installed arguments, the machine held its own. "I can't say it makes my blood boil, because I have no blood," it quipped, "but it seems some people naturally suspect technology because it's new." Project Debater is a remarkable achievement.

Visitors to Australia's federal parliament are often surprised by the robust verbal confrontation between the government and the opposition – technically known as questions without notice, more commonly as question time. A theatrical highpoint of every sitting day, question time is part intellectual cage fight, part kindergarten spat – and all psychological warfare. Political journalists watch the hour-long question time as drought-stricken farmers view the clouds. They look for signs, they read the climate. But what if you were interested in facts?