Answering compositional questions that require multiple steps of reasoning against text is challenging, especially when they involve discrete, symbolic operations. Neural module networks (NMNs) learn to parse such questions as executable programs composed of learnable modules, performing well on synthetic visual QA domains. However, we find that it is challenging to learn these models for non-synthetic questions on open-domain text, where a model needs to deal with the diversity of natural language and perform a broader range of reasoning. We extend NMNs by: (a) introducing modules that reason over a paragraph of text, performing symbolic reasoning (such as arithmetic, sorting, counting) over numbers and dates in a probabilistic and differentiable manner; and (b) proposing an unsupervised auxiliary loss to help extract arguments associated with the events in text. Additionally, we show that a limited amount of heuristically-obtained question program and intermediate module output supervision provides sufficient inductive bias for accurate learning. Our proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on a subset of the DROP dataset that poses a variety of reasoning challenges that are covered by our modules.

通过引入能够对文本段进行推理的组件、以概率性和可微分的方式执行数字和日期等符号推理的组件，提出了一种改进的神经模块网络（NMNs）模型，提高了非合成问题的预测效果，实验结果表明，该模型在DROP数据集上取得了显著的性能提升。

神经模块网络用于文本推理