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EMNLP Findings2025

A Zero-Shot Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Complex Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Prerna Agarwal, Srikanta Bedathur

Abstract

Existing low-resource Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) methods rely heavily on Large Language Models (LLMs) for semantic parsing of natural language question to its corresponding logical form (LF) such as SPARQL, S-Expression, etc. However, LLMs becomes bottleneck for practical applications due to: (1) its high computational resource requirements; (2) limited knowledge of LLM about different LFs; (3) unavailability of lowresource annotated data for new KGs and settings. This motivates us to design a KGQA framework that can operate in a zero-shot setting without the need for additional resources. In this paper, we propose (NS-KGQA) 1 : a zeroshot neuro-symbolic approach based on neural KG embeddings that have demonstrated their ability to effectively model the structure of the KG without the need for additional data. We extract a link-prediction based symbolic question subgraph. We then propose a Symbolic Resolver that uses Dual KG Embeddings combined with a symbolic approach to resolve the symbolic question subgraph. Our extensive experiments on Complex KGQA benchmarks such as KQA Pro demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. NS-KGQA outperforms all other LLM-based zero-shot baselines by 26% (avg).

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