# HopPG: Self-Iterative Program Generation for Multi-Hop Question Answering over Heterogeneous Knowledge Source: [HopPG: Self-Iterative Program Generation for Multi-Hop Question Answering over Heterogeneous Knowledge]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-27T06:26:19.104Z Authors: Yingyao Wang, Yongwei Zhou, Chaoqun Duan, Junwei Bao, Tiejun Zhao Published: 2023-08-22T08:00:50.000Z ## Abstract The semantic parsing-based method is an important research branch for knowledge-based question answering. It usually generates executable programs lean upon the question and then conduct them to reason answers over a knowledge base. Benefit from this inherent mechanism, it has advantages in the performance and the interpretability. However, traditional semantic parsing methods usually generate a complete program before executing it, which struggles with multi-hop question answering over heterogeneous knowledge. On one hand, generating a complete multi-hop program relies on multiple heterogeneous supporting facts, and it is difficult for generators to understand these facts simultaneously. On the other hand, this way ignores the semantic information of the intermediate answers at each hop, which is beneficial for subsequent generation. To alleviate these challenges, we propose a self-iterative framework for multi-hop program generation (HopPG) over heterogeneous knowledge, which leverages the previous execution results to retrieve supporting facts and generate subsequent programs hop by hop. We evaluate our model on MMQA-T^2, and the experimental results show that HopPG outperforms existing semantic-parsing-based baselines, especially on the multi-hop questions. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()