UniRPG: Unified Discrete Reasoning over Table and Text as Program Generation

Understand

Question answering requiring discrete reasoning, e.g., arithmetic computing, comparison, and counting, over knowledge is a challenging task.

• In this paper, we propose UniRPG, a semantic-parsing-based approach advanced in interpretability and scalability, to perform unified discrete reasoning over heterogeneous knowledge resources, i.e., table and text, as program generation.
• Concretely, UniRPG consists of a neural programmer and a symbolic program executor, where a program is the composition of a set of pre-defined general atomic and higher-order operations and arguments extracted from table and text.
• First, the programmer parses a question into a program by generating operations and copying arguments, and then the executor derives answers from table and text based on the program.