Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought

Ori Yoran, Tomer Wolfson, Ben Bogin, Uri Katz, Daniel Deutch, Jonathan Berant

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

Modern systems for multi-hop question answering (QA) typically break questions into a sequence of reasoning steps, termed chain-of-thought (CoT), before arriving at a final answer. Often, multiple chains are sampled and aggregated through a voting mechanism over the final answers, but the intermediate steps themselves are discarded. While such approaches improve performance, they do not consider the relations between intermediate steps across chains and do not provide a unified explanation for the predicted answer. We introduce Multi-Chain Reasoning (MCR), an approach which prompts large language models to meta-reason over multiple chains of thought, rather than aggregate their answers. MCR examines different reasoning chains, mixes information between them and selects the most relevant facts in generating an explanation and predicting the answer. MCR outperforms strong baselines on 7 multi-hop QA datasets. Moreover, our analysis reveals that MCR explanations exhibit high quality, enabling humans to verify its answers.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2023 - 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings
EditorsHouda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages5942-5966
Number of pages25
ISBN (Electronic)9798891760608
StatePublished - 2023
Event2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2023 - Hybrid, Singapore, Singapore
Duration: 6 Dec 202310 Dec 2023

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2023 - 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings

Conference

Conference2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2023
Country/TerritorySingapore
CityHybrid, Singapore
Period6/12/2310/12/23

Funding

FundersFunder number
European Union Horizons 2020 research and innovation programmeDELPHI 802800
Yandex Initiative for Machine Learning
European Research Council

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this