  Relation detection is a core component for many NLP applications including
Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA). In this paper, we propose a
hierarchical recurrent neural network enhanced by residual learning that
detects KB relations given an input question. Our method uses deep residual
bidirectional LSTMs to compare questions and relation names via different
hierarchies of abstraction. Additionally, we propose a simple KBQA system that
integrates entity linking and our proposed relation detector to enable one
enhance another. Experimental results evidence that our approach achieves not
only outstanding relation detection performance, but more importantly, it helps
our KBQA system to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy for both single-relation
(SimpleQuestions) and multi-relation (WebQSP) QA benchmarks.
