Fusing Temporal Graphs into Transformers for Time-Sensitive Question Answering

Bibliographic Details
Title: Fusing Temporal Graphs into Transformers for Time-Sensitive Question Answering
Authors: Su, Xin, Howard, Phillip, Hakim, Nagib, Bethard, Steven
Publication Year: 2023
Collection: Computer Science
Subject Terms: Computer Science - Computation and Language
More Details: Answering time-sensitive questions from long documents requires temporal reasoning over the times in questions and documents. An important open question is whether large language models can perform such reasoning solely using a provided text document, or whether they can benefit from additional temporal information extracted using other systems. We address this research question by applying existing temporal information extraction systems to construct temporal graphs of events, times, and temporal relations in questions and documents. We then investigate different approaches for fusing these graphs into Transformer models. Experimental results show that our proposed approach for fusing temporal graphs into input text substantially enhances the temporal reasoning capabilities of Transformer models with or without fine-tuning. Additionally, our proposed method outperforms various graph convolution-based approaches and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on SituatedQA and three splits of TimeQA.
Comment: EMNLP 2023 Findings
Document Type: Working Paper
Access URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.19292
Accession Number: edsarx.2310.19292
Database: arXiv
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