金融领域的数值推理 - 进行定量分析并总结了财务报告中的信息 - 可以大大提高业务效率并降低数十亿美元的成本。在这里，我们提出了一个数值推理问答系统，以回答财务文本和表数据源之间的数值推理问题，该问题由回收器模块，发电机模块和集合模块组成。具体而言，除了检索整个行数据外，我们还创新设计了一个细胞回收器，该池检索器可以检索金单元，以避免将同一行中的无关和相似的单元带到发电机模块的输入中。在发电机模块中，我们利用多个发电机来生产程序，这是回答问题的操作步骤。最后，在整体模块中，我们集成了多个程序，以选择最佳程序作为系统的输出。在FinQA竞争中的最终私人测试集中，我们的系统获得了69.79的执行精度。

Long-form numerical reasoning in financial analysis aims to generate a reasoning program to calculate the correct answer for a given question. Previous work followed a retriever-generator framework, where the retriever selects key facts from a long-form document, and the generator generates a reasoning program based on retrieved facts. However, they treated all facts equally without considering the different contributions of facts with and without numbers. Meanwhile, the program consistency were ignored under supervised training, resulting in lower training accuracy and diversity. To solve these problems, we proposed APOLLO to improve the long-form numerical reasoning framework. For the retriever, we adopt a number-aware negative sampling strategy to enable the retriever to be more discriminative on key numerical facts. For the generator, we design consistency-based reinforcement learning and target program augmentation strategy based on the consistency of program execution results. Experimental results on the FinQA and ConvFinQA leaderboard verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving the new state-of-the-art.

Hybrid tabular-textual question answering (QA) requires reasoning from heterogeneous information, and the types of reasoning are mainly divided into numerical reasoning and span extraction. Despite being the main challenge of the task compared to extractive QA, current numerical reasoning method simply uses LSTM to autoregressively decode program sequences, and each decoding step produces either an operator or an operand. However, the step-by-step decoding suffers from exposure bias, and the accuracy of program generation drops sharply with progressive decoding. In this paper, we propose a non-autoregressive program generation framework, which facilitates program generation in parallel. Our framework, which independently generates complete program tuples containing both operators and operands, can significantly boost the speed of program generation while addressing the error accumulation issue. Our experiments on the MultiHiertt dataset shows that our model can bring about large improvements (+7.97 EM and +6.38 F1 points) over the strong baseline, establishing the new state-of-the-art performance, while being much faster (21x) in program generation. The performance drop of our method is also significantly smaller than the baseline with increasing numbers of numerical reasoning steps.

Structured tabular data exist across nearly all fields. Reasoning task over these data aims to answer questions or determine the truthiness of hypothesis sentences by understanding the semantic meaning of a table. While previous works have devoted significant efforts to the tabular reasoning task, they always assume there are sufficient labeled data. However, constructing reasoning samples over tables (and related text) is labor-intensive, especially when the reasoning process is complex. When labeled data is insufficient, the performance of models will suffer an unendurable decline. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for unsupervised complex tabular reasoning (UCTR), which generates sufficient and diverse synthetic data with complex logic for tabular reasoning tasks, assuming no human-annotated data at all. We first utilize a random sampling strategy to collect diverse programs of different types and execute them on tables based on a "Program-Executor" module. To bridge the gap between the programs and natural language sentences, we design a powerful "NL-Generator" module to generate natural language sentences with complex logic from these programs. Since a table often occurs with its surrounding texts, we further propose novel "Table-to-Text" and "Text-to-Table" operators to handle joint table-text reasoning scenarios. This way, we can adequately exploit the unlabeled table resources to obtain a well-performed reasoning model under an unsupervised setting. Our experiments cover different tasks (question answering and fact verification) and different domains (general and specific), showing that our unsupervised methods can achieve at most 93% performance compared to supervised models. We also find that it can substantially boost the supervised performance in low-resourced domains as a data augmentation technique. Our code is available at https://github.com/leezythu/UCTR.

作为自然语言处理领域的后起之秀，在各行各业中，问答系统（问答系统）被广泛使用。与其他方案相比，在Q＆A系统的可追溯性和解释性方面，财务方案的应用程序有很强的要求。此外，由于对人工智能技术的需求已从最初的计算智能转变为认知智能，因此这项研究主要集中于财务数值推理数据集-FinQA。在共享任务中，目标是根据包含文本和表的给定财务报告生成推理程序和最终答案。我们使用基于Deberta预训练的语言模型的方法，并采用其他优化方法，包括在此基础上进行多模型融合，训练集组合。我们最终获得了68.99的执行精度和64.53的程序精度，在2022 FinQA挑战中排名第4。

使用来自表格（TableQA）的信息回答自然语言问题是最近的兴趣。在许多应用程序中，表未孤立，但嵌入到非结构化文本中。通常，通过将其部分与表格单元格内容或非结构化文本跨度匹配，并从任一源中提取答案来最佳地回答问题。这导致了HybridQA数据集引入的TextableQA问题的新空间。现有的表格表示对基于变换器的阅读理解（RC）架构的适应性未通过单个系统解决两个表示的不同模式。培训此类系统因对遥远监督的需求而进一步挑战。为了降低认知负担，培训实例通常包括问题和答案，后者匹配多个表行和文本段。这导致嘈杂的多实例培训制度不仅涉及表的行，而且涵盖了链接文本的跨度。我们通过提出Mitqa来回应这些挑战，这是一个新的TextableQA系统，明确地模拟了表行选择和文本跨度选择的不同但密切相关的概率空间。与最近的基线相比，我们的实验表明了我们的方法的优越性。该方法目前在HybridQA排行榜的顶部，并进行了一个试验集，在以前公布的结果上实现了对em和f1的21％的绝对改善。

表问题回答（表QA）是指从表中提供精确的答案来回答用户的问题。近年来，在表质量检查方面有很多作品，但是对该研究主题缺乏全面的调查。因此，我们旨在提供表QA中可用数据集和代表性方法的概述。我们根据其技术将现有的表质量质量质量检查分为五个类别，其中包括基于语义的，生成，提取，基于匹配的基于匹配的方法和基于检索的方法。此外，由于表质量质量质量检查仍然是现有方法的一项艰巨的任务，因此我们还识别和概述了一些关键挑战，并讨论了表质量质量检查的潜在未来方向。

Table-and-text hybrid question answering (HybridQA) is a widely used and challenging NLP task commonly applied in the financial and scientific domain. The early research focuses on migrating other QA task methods to HybridQA, while with further research, more and more HybridQA-specific methods have been present. With the rapid development of HybridQA, the systematic survey is still under-explored to summarize the main techniques and advance further research. So we present this work to summarize the current HybridQA benchmarks and methods, then analyze the challenges and future directions of this task. The contributions of this paper can be summarized in three folds: (1) first survey, to our best knowledge, including benchmarks, methods and challenges for HybridQA; (2) systematic investigation with the reasonable comparison of the existing systems to articulate their advantages and shortcomings; (3) detailed analysis of challenges in four important dimensions to shed light on future directions.

目前用于开放域问题的最先进的生成模型（ODQA）专注于从非结构化文本信息生成直接答案。但是，大量的世界知识存储在结构化数据库中，并且需要使用SQL等查询语言访问。此外，查询语言可以回答需要复杂推理的问题，以及提供完全的解释性。在本文中，我们提出了一个混合框架，将文本和表格证据占据了输入，并根据哪种形式更好地回答这个问题而生成直接答案或SQL查询。然后可以在关联的数据库上执行生成的SQL查询以获得最终答案。据我们所知，这是第一种将Text2SQL与ODQA任务应用于ODQA任务的论文。凭经验，我们证明，在几个ODQA数据集上，混合方法始终如一地优于仅采用大边缘的均匀输入的基线模型。具体地，我们使用T5基础模型实现OpenSquad数据集的最先进的性能。在一个详细的分析中，我们证明能够生成结构的SQL查询可以始终带来增益，特别是对于那些需要复杂推理的问题。

Fact verification has attracted a lot of research attention recently, e.g., in journalism, marketing, and policymaking, as misinformation and disinformation online can sway one's opinion and affect one's actions. While fact-checking is a hard task in general, in many cases, false statements can be easily debunked based on analytics over tables with reliable information. Hence, table-based fact verification has recently emerged as an important and growing research area. Yet, progress has been limited due to the lack of datasets that can be used to pre-train language models (LMs) to be aware of common table operations, such as aggregating a column or comparing tuples. To bridge this gap, in this paper we introduce PASTA, a novel state-of-the-art framework for table-based fact verification via pre-training with synthesized sentence-table cloze questions. In particular, we design six types of common sentence-table cloze tasks, including Filter, Aggregation, Superlative, Comparative, Ordinal, and Unique, based on which we synthesize a large corpus consisting of 1.2 million sentence-table pairs from WikiTables. PASTA uses a recent pre-trained LM, DeBERTaV3, and further pretrains it on our corpus. Our experimental results show that PASTA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two table-based fact verification benchmarks: TabFact and SEM-TAB-FACTS. In particular, on the complex set of TabFact, which contains multiple operations, PASTA largely outperforms the previous state of the art by 4.7 points (85.6% vs. 80.9%), and the gap between PASTA and human performance on the small TabFact test set is narrowed to just 1.5 points (90.6% vs. 92.1%).

在现实世界中的问题回答场景中，将表格和文本内容均结合的混合形式吸引了越来越多的关注，其中数值推理问题是最典型和最具挑战性的问题之一。现有方法通常采用编码器框架来表示混合内容并生成答案。但是，它无法捕获编码器侧数值，表格架构和文本信息之间的丰富关系。解码器使用一个简单的预定义运算符分类器，该分类器的灵活性不足以处理具有不同表达式的数值推理过程。为了解决这些问题，本文提出了一个\ textbf {re} lational \ textbf {g} raph增强\ textbf {h} ybrid table-text \ textbf {n}带有\ textbf {t textbf {t text} ree decoder（\ textbff recoder（\ textbf） {reghnt}）。它模拟了对表 - 文本混合内容的回答的数值问题，作为表达树的生成任务。此外，我们提出了一种新颖的关系图建模方法，该方法模拟了问题，表和段落之间的对齐方式。我们验证了公开可用的Table-Text混合质量质量质量标准（TAT-QA）的模型。拟议的reghnt显着胜过基线模型，并实现最新结果\脚注{我们在〜\ url {https://github.com/lfy79001/reghnt}}}〜（20222）公开发布了源代码和数据-05-05）。

解决数学单词问题需要对文本中的数量进行演绎推理。各种最近的研究工作主要依赖于序列到序列或序列模型，以生成数学表达式，而无需在给定情况下明确执行数量之间的关系推理。尽管经验上有效，但这种方法通常并未为生成的表达提供解释。在这项工作中，我们将任务视为一个复杂的关系提取问题，提出了一种新的方法，该方法提出了可解释的演绎推理步骤，以迭代构建目标表达式，其中每个步骤涉及两个定义其关系的数量的原始操作。通过在四个基准数据集上进行的大量实验，我们表明该提出的模型显着优于现有的强基础。我们进一步证明，演绎过程不仅提出了更可解释的步骤，而且还使我们能够对需要更复杂推理的问题进行更准确的预测。

Parsing natural language questions into executable logical forms is a useful and interpretable way to perform question answering on structured data such as knowledge bases (KB) or databases (DB). However, existing approaches on semantic parsing cannot adapt to both modalities, as they suffer from the exponential growth of the logical form candidates and can hardly generalize to unseen data. In this work, we propose Uni-Parser, a unified semantic parser for question answering (QA) on both KB and DB. We introduce the primitive (relation and entity in KB, and table name, column name and cell value in DB) as an essential element in our framework. The number of primitives grows linearly with the number of retrieved relations in KB and DB, preventing us from dealing with exponential logic form candidates. We leverage the generator to predict final logical forms by altering and composing topranked primitives with different operations (e.g. select, where, count). With sufficiently pruned search space by a contrastive primitive ranker, the generator is empowered to capture the composition of primitives enhancing its generalization ability. We achieve competitive results on multiple KB and DB QA benchmarks more efficiently, especially in the compositional and zero-shot settings.

Multi-modal and multi-hop question answering aims to answer a question based on multiple input sources from different modalities. Previous methods retrieve the evidence separately and feed the retrieved evidence to a language model to generate the corresponding answer. However, these methods fail to build connections between candidates and thus cannot model the inter-dependent relation during retrieval. Moreover, the reasoning process over multi-modality candidates can be unbalanced without building alignments between different modalities. To address this limitation, we propose a Structured Knowledge and Unified Retrieval Generation based method (SKURG). We align the sources from different modalities via the shared entities and map them into a shared semantic space via structured knowledge. Then, we utilize a unified retrieval-generation decoder to integrate intermediate retrieval results for answer generation and adaptively determine the number of retrieval steps. We perform experiments on two multi-modal and multi-hop datasets: WebQA and MultimodalQA. The results demonstrate that SKURG achieves state-of-the-art performance on both retrieval and answer generation.

从头开始解决复杂问题通常是有挑战性的，但如果我们可以访问其解决方案的其他类似问题，则更容易 - 一种称为基于案例的推理（CBR）的范式。我们提出了一种神经象征性的CBR方法（CBR-KBQA），用于在大知识库上应答。 CBR-KBQA由非参数内存组成，该内存存储案例（问题和逻辑表单）和参数模型，该参数模型可以通过检索与其相关的案例来为新问题生成逻辑表单。在包含复杂问题的几个KBQA数据集上，CBR-KBQA实现了竞争性能。例如，在ComplexWebQuestions数据集上，CBR-KBQA以11 \％的准确度优于当前最新状态。此外，我们表明CBR-KBQA能够使用新案例\ EMPH {没有}任何进一步的培训：通过在案例存储器中纳入一些人类标记的示例，CBR-KBQA能够成功地生成包含未经看线KB实体的逻辑表格以及关系。

今天的大部分AI系统都专注于使用自我关注机制和变压器架构在大量多样化的数据中实现令人印象深刻的性能收益。在本文中，我们建议使用外部注意机制增强变压器架构，以带来外部知识和背景。通过将外部信息集成到预测过程中，我们希望减少对更大的模型的需求，并增加AI系统的民主化。我们发现所提出的外部注意机制可以显着提高现有AI系统的性能，使从业者可以轻松地将基础AI模型自定义到许多不同的下游应用程序。特别是，我们专注于勤杂朗语推理的任务，展示所提出的外部注意机制可以增加现有的变压器模型，并显着提高模型的推理能力。拟议的系统，知识外部关注推理（Kear），达到了开放的铜商QA研究基准的人类奇偶校验，其准确性为89.4 \％，与人类准确性为88.9 \％。

The emergence of large pretrained models has enabled language models to achieve superior performance in common NLP tasks, including language modeling and question answering, compared to previous static word representation methods. Augmenting these models with a retriever to retrieve the related text and documents as supporting information has shown promise in effectively solving NLP problems in a more interpretable way given that the additional knowledge is injected explicitly rather than being captured in the models' parameters. In spite of the recent progress, our analysis on retriever-augmented language models shows that this class of language models still lack reasoning over the retrieved documents. In this paper, we study the strengths and weaknesses of different retriever-augmented language models such as REALM, kNN-LM, FiD, ATLAS, and Flan-T5 in reasoning over the selected documents in different tasks. In particular, we analyze the reasoning failures of each of these models and study how the models' failures in reasoning are rooted in the retriever module as well as the language model.

Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and is applicable in various fields, including science, engineering, finance, and everyday life. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of solving math problems and proving theorems has garnered significant interest in the fields of machine learning and natural language processing. For example, mathematics serves as a testbed for aspects of reasoning that are challenging for powerful deep learning models, driving new algorithmic and modeling advances. On the other hand, recent advances in large-scale neural language models have opened up new benchmarks and opportunities to use deep learning for mathematical reasoning. In this survey paper, we review the key tasks, datasets, and methods at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and deep learning over the past decade. We also evaluate existing benchmarks and methods, and discuss future research directions in this domain.

我们提出了一种系统推理的方法，该方法生产了基于事实基础的人类可解释的证明树。我们的解决方案类似于经典的基于序言的推理引擎的风格，在该引擎中，我们通过神经语言建模，指导生成和半磁头密集检索的结合来代替手工制作的规则。这款新颖的推理引擎Nellie动态实例化了可解释的推理规则，这些规则捕获和分数构成（DE）在自然语言陈述上。内莉（Nellie）在科学质量检查数据集上提供竞争性能，需要对多个事实进行结构化解释。

表中的信息可能是文本的重要补充，使基于表的问题答案（QA）具有巨大的价值。处理表的内在复杂性通常会增加模型设计和数据注释的额外负担。在本文中，我们旨在以最少的注释工作开发一个简单的基于表的质量检查模型。由于基于表的质量检查需要问题和表之间的对齐方式以及在多个表元素上执行复杂推理的能力，因此我们提出了一种杂食性的预读方法，该方法既可以消耗自然数据，又提出了合成数据，以使模型具有这些各自的能力。具体而言，鉴于可免费获得的表，我们利用检索将它们与相关的自然句子配对，以进行掩盖预处理，并通过将SQL从表中进行转换为QA损失进行预处理而合成NL问题。我们在几次和完整的设置中都进行了广泛的实验，结果清楚地证明了模型omnitab的优势，最好的多任务方法分别实现了16.2％和2.7％的绝对增益，在128次和完整的设置中也获得了2.7％建立有关Wickitable Questions的最新最新。详细的消融和分析揭示了自然和合成数据的不同特征，从而阐明了杂食性预处理的未来方向。可以在https://github.com/jzbjyb/omnitab上获得代码，预读数据和预算模型。