Learning to Build Reasoning Chains by Reliable Path Retrieval

Question answering (QA) systems have long pursued the ability to reason over explicit knowledge credibly. Recent work has incorporated knowledge into fine-grained sentences and constructed natural language database (NLDB) task, and conducts complex QA with explicit reasoning chains. Existing models focus on retrieving evidence by combining multiple modules or discretely. However, these models ignore utilizing path information (e.g. sentence order), which is proven to be important for evidence retrievers. In this work, we propose a ReliAble Path-retrieval (RAP) to generate varying length evidence chains iteratively. It comprehensively models reasoning chains and introduces loss from two views. The experimental results show that our model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on both evidence chain retrieval and question-answering tasks. Additional experiments on sequential supervised and sequential unsupervised retrieval fully indicate the significance of RAP.