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.

Text2NKG: Fine-Grained N-ary Relation Extraction for N-ary relational Knowledge Graph Construction

Beyond traditional binary relational facts, n-ary relational knowledge graphs (NKGs) are comprised of n-ary relational facts containing more than two entities, which are closer to real-world facts with broader applications. However, the construction of NKGs still significantly relies on manual labor, and n-ary relation extraction still remains at a course-grained level, which is always in a single schema and fixed arity of entities. To address these restrictions, we propose Text2NKG, a novel fine-grained n-ary relation extraction framework for n-ary relational knowledge graph construction. We introduce a span-tuple classification approach with hetero-ordered merging to accomplish fine-grained n-ary relation extraction in different arity. Furthermore, Text2NKG supports four typical NKG schemas: hyper-relational schema, event-based schema, role-based schema, and hypergraph-based schema, with high flexibility and practicality. Experimental results demonstrate that Text2NKG outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model by nearly 20\% points in the $F_1$ scores on the fine-grained n-ary relation extraction benchmark in the hyper-relational schema. Our code and datasets are publicly available.

HAHE: Hierarchical Attention for Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs in Global and Local Level

Link Prediction on Hyper-relational Knowledge Graphs (HKG) is a worthwhile endeavor. HKG consists of hyper-relational facts (H-Facts), composed of a main triple and several auxiliary attribute-value qualifiers, which can effectively represent factually comprehensive information. The internal structure of HKG can be represented as a hypergraph-based representation globally and a semantic sequence-based representation locally. However, existing research seldom simultaneously models the graphical and sequential structure of HKGs, limiting HKGs' representation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Hierarchical Attention model for HKG Embedding (HAHE), including global-level and local-level attention. The global-level attention can model the graphical structure of HKG using hypergraph dual-attention layers, while the local-level attention can learn the sequential structure inside H-Facts via heterogeneous self-attention layers. Experiment results indicate that HAHE achieves state-of-the-art performance in link prediction tasks on HKG standard datasets. In addition, HAHE addresses the issue of HKG multi-position prediction for the first time, increasing the applicability of the HKG link prediction task. Our code is publicly available.

NQE: N-ary Query Embedding for Complex Query Answering over Hyper-relational Knowledge Graphs

Complex query answering (CQA) is an essential task for multi-hop and logical reasoning on knowledge graphs (KGs). Currently, most approaches are limited to queries among binary relational facts and pay less attention to n-ary facts (n>=2) containing more than two entities, which are more prevalent in the real world. Moreover, previous CQA methods can only make predictions for a few given types of queries and cannot be flexibly extended to more complex logical queries, which significantly limits their applications. To overcome these challenges, in this work, we propose a novel N-ary Query Embedding (NQE) model for CQA over hyper-relational knowledge graphs (HKGs), which include massive n-ary facts. The NQE utilizes a dual-heterogeneous Transformer encoder and fuzzy logic theory to satisfy all n-ary FOL queries, including existential quantifiers, conjunction, disjunction, and negation. We also propose a parallel processing algorithm that can train or predict arbitrary n-ary FOL queries in a single batch, regardless of the kind of each query, with good flexibility and extensibility. In addition, we generate a new CQA dataset WD50K-NFOL, including diverse n-ary FOL queries over WD50K. Experimental results on WD50K-NFOL and other standard CQA datasets show that NQE is the state-of-the-art CQA method over HKGs with good generalization capability. Our code and dataset are publicly available.