ChatKBQA: A Generate-then-Retrieve Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering with Fine-tuned Large Language Models

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to derive answers to natural language questions over large-scale knowledge bases (KBs), which are generally divided into two research components: knowledge retrieval and semantic parsing. However, three core challenges remain, including inefficient knowledge retrieval, retrieval errors adversely affecting semantic parsing, and the complexity of previous KBQA methods. In the era of large language models (LLMs), we introduce ChatKBQA, a novel generate-then-retrieve KBQA framework built on fine-tuning open-source LLMs such as Llama-2, ChatGLM2 and Baichuan2. ChatKBQA proposes generating the logical form with fine-tuned LLMs first, then retrieving and replacing entities and relations through an unsupervised retrieval method, which improves both generation and retrieval more straightforwardly. Experimental results reveal that ChatKBQA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on standard KBQA datasets, WebQSP, and ComplexWebQuestions (CWQ). This work also provides a new paradigm for combining LLMs with knowledge graphs (KGs) for interpretable and knowledge-required question answering. Our code is publicly available.