Interpretable Proof Generation via Iterative Backward Reasoning

Anonymous

Abstract: We present IBR, an Iterative Backward Reasoning to solve the proof generation task on rule-based Question Answering (QA), where models are required to reason over a series of textual rules and facts to find out the related proof path and derive the final answer. We handle the limitations of existed works in two folds: 1) enhance the interpretability of reasoning procedure with detailed tracking, by predicting nodes and edges in the proof path iteratively backward from the question; 2) promote the efficiency and accuracy via reasoning on the elaborate representations of nodes and history path, without any intermediate texts that may introduce external noise during proof generation. There are three main modules in IBR, QA and proof strategy prediction to obtain the answer and offer guidance for the following procedure; parent node prediction to determine a node in the existing proof that a child node will link to; child node prediction to find out which new node will be added to the proof. Experiments on both synthetic and paraphrased datasets demonstrate that IBR has a better in-domain performance as well as cross-domain transferability than state-of-the-art models.

Paper Type: long