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EMNLP Findings2022

ReaRev: Adaptive Reasoning for Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

Costas Mavromatis, George Karypis

Abstract

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) involves retrieving entities as answers from a Knowledge Graph (KG) using natural language queries. The challenge is to learn to reason over question-relevant KG facts that traverse KG entities and lead to the question answers. To facilitate reasoning, the question is decoded into instructions, which are dense question representations used to guide the KG traversals. However, if the derived instructions do not exactly match the underlying KG information, they may lead to reasoning under irrelevant context.

Our method, termed REAREV, introduces a new way to KGQA reasoning with respect to both instruction decoding and execution. To improve instruction decoding, we perform reasoning in an adaptive manner, where KGaware information is used to iteratively update the initial instructions. To improve instruction execution, we emulate breadth-first search (BFS) with graph neural networks (GNNs). The BFS strategy treats the instructions as a set and allows our method to decide on their execution order on the fly. Experimental results on three KGQA benchmarks demonstrate the REAREV's effectiveness compared with previous state-of-the-art, especially when the KG is incomplete or when we tackle complex questions. Our code is publicly available at https: //github.com/cmavro/ReaRev_KGQA.

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Cited by top-tier papers9

  1. NuTrea: Neural Tree Search for Context-guided Multi-hop KGQAHyeong Kyu Choi, Seunghun Lee, Jaewon Chu, Hyunwoo J. KimNeurIPS 2023 · 20 citations
  2. Fine-tuned LLMs Know More, Hallucinate Less with Few-Shot Sequence-to-Sequence Semantic Parsing over WikidataSilei Xu, Shicheng Liu, Theo Culhane, Elizaveta Pertseva et al.EMNLP 2023 · 10 citations
  3. BYOKG-RAG: Multi-Strategy Graph Retrieval for Knowledge Graph Question AnsweringCostas Mavromatis, Soji Adeshina, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Zhen Han et al.EMNLP 2025 · 1 citation
  4. Question-Adaptive Graph Learning for Multi-hop Retrieval Augmented GenerationYuchen Yan, Peiyan Zhang, Zhihua Liu, Hao Wang et al.SIGIR 2026
  5. Graph-constrained Reasoning: Faithful Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs with Large Language ModelsLinhao Luo, Zicheng Zhao, Gholamreza Haffari, Yuan-Fang Li et al.ICML 2025

Builds on10

  1. Improving Multi-hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs using Knowledge Base EmbeddingsApoorv Saxena, Aditay Tripathi, Partha P. TalukdarACL 2020 · 488 citations
  2. Scalable Multi-Hop Relational Reasoning for Knowledge-Aware Question AnsweringYanlin Feng, Xinyue Chen, Bill Yuchen Lin, Peifeng Wang et al.EMNLP 2020 · 207 citations
  3. Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge BasesRajarshi Das, Manzil Zaheer, Dung Thai, Ameya Godbole et al.EMNLP 2021 · 111 citations
  4. TransferNet: An Effective and Transparent Framework for Multi-hop Question Answering over Relation GraphJiaxin Shi, Shulin Cao, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li et al.EMNLP 2021 · 97 citations
  5. LEGO: Latent Execution-Guided Reasoning for Multi-Hop Question Answering on Knowledge GraphsHongyu Ren, Hanjun Dai, Bo Dai, Xinyun Chen et al.ICML 2021 · 94 citations

Related papers

  1. Question-guided Knowledge Graph Re-scoring and Injection for Knowledge Graph Question AnsweringYu Zhang, Kehai Chen, Xuefeng Bai, Zhao Kang et al.EMNLP Findings 2024 · 6 citations
  2. Graph Reasoning for Question Answering with Triplet RetrievalShiyang Li, Yifan Gao, Haoming Jiang, Qingyu Yin et al.ACL Findings 2023 · 42 citations
  3. Inductive Logical Query Answering in Knowledge GraphsMichael Galkin, Zhaocheng Zhu, Hongyu Ren, Jian TangNeurIPS 2022 · 36 citations
  4. GNN-RAG: Graph Neural Retrieval for Efficient Large Language Model Reasoning on Knowledge GraphsCostas Mavromatis, George KarypisACL Findings 2025 · 83 citations
  5. iQUEST: An Iterative Question-Guided Framework for Knowledge Base Question AnsweringShuai Wang, Yinan YuACL 2025 · 12 citations
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