Reasoning with Ontology Graph: Toward Type-Constrained Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced knowledge graph question answering (KGQA), but current methods tend to rely on LLM-induced type systems with inconsistent granularity, or perform multi-hop reasoning without explicit target-type constraints. We introduce OntGQA, a type-constrained KGQA framework that reasons over a relation-centric ontology graph, where each relation is labeled with its head and tail entity types to provide a stable schema backbone. Built on this graph, OntGQA adopts a planner–judge architecture with generative backoff: a type planner proposes plausible head–tail type pairs, a judge verifies retrieved candidates and their paths, and a generator is invoked only when all candidates are rejected. By constraining both endpoints of reasoning in type space, Ont-GQA achieves state-of-the-art performance and produces ontology-grounded reasoning chains, with substantial Hit@1 gains (87.7% → 91.5% on WebQSP and 67.6% → 74.6% on CWQ).