Skip to main content
Log in

Simple Question Answering over Knowledge Graph Enhanced by Question Pattern Classification

  • Regular Paper
  • Published:
Knowledge and Information Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Question answering over knowledge graph (KGQA), which automatically answers natural language questions by querying the facts in knowledge graph (KG), has drawn significant attention in recent years. In this paper, we focus on single-relation questions, which can be answered through a single fact in KG. This task is a non-trivial problem since capturing the meaning of questions and selecting the golden fact from billions of facts in KG are both challengeable. We propose a pipeline framework for KGQA, which consists of three cascaded components: (1) an entity detection model, which can label the entity mention in the question; (2) a novel entity linking model, which considers the contextual information of candidate entities in KG and builds a question pattern classifier according to the correlations between question patterns and relation types to mitigate entity ambiguity problem; and (3) a simple yet effective relation detection model, which is used to match the semantic similarity between the question and relation candidates. Substantial experiments on the SimpleQuestions benchmark dataset show that our proposed method could achieve better performance than many existing state-of-the-art methods on accuracy, top-N recall and other evaluation metrics.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Bahdanau D, Cho K, Bengio Y (2015) Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate. In: ‘ICLR’, OpenReview.net

  2. Bao J, Duan N, Yan Z, Zhou M, Zhao T (2016) Constraint-based question answering with knowledge graph. In: ‘COLING’, ACL 2503–2514

  3. Bhutani N, Zheng X, Qian K, Li Y, Jagadish H (2020) Answering complex questions by combining information from curated and extracted knowledge bases. In: ‘ACL’. The association for computer linguistics 1–10

  4. Bollacker K, Evans C, Paritosh P, Sturge T, Taylor J (2008) Freebase: a collaboratively created graph database for structuring human knowledge. In: ‘SIGMOD’. ACM 1247–1250

  5. Bordes A, Usunier N, Chopra S, Weston J (2015) ‘Large-scale simple question answering with memory networks. arXiv:1506.02075

  6. Buzaaba H, Amagasa T (2019) A modular approach for efficient simple question answering over knowledge base. In: ‘DEXA’. Springer 237–246

  7. Buzaaba H, Amagasa T (2021) Question answering over knowledge base: a scheme for integrating subject and the identified relation to answer simple questions. SN Comput Sci 2(1):25

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Carlson A, Betteridge J, Kisiel B, Settles B, Hruschka E, Mitchell T (2010) Toward an architecture for never-ending language learning. In: ‘AAAI’, vol 24. AAAI Press

  9. Chen Z-Y, Chang C-H, Chen Y-P, Nayak J, Ku L-W (2019) Uhop: An unrestricted-hop relation extraction framework for knowledge-based question answering. In: ‘NAACL’. Association for computational linguistics 345–356

  10. Dai Z, Li L, Xu W (2016) CFO: conditional focused neural question answering with large-scale knowledge bases. In: ‘ACL’. The Association for Computer Linguistics

  11. Dubey M, Banerjee D, Abdelkawi A, Lehmann J (2019) Lc-quad 2.0: a large dataset for complex question answering over wikidata and dbpedia. In: ‘ISWC’, Vol. 11779, Springer, pp 69–78

  12. Han J, Cheng B, Wang X (2020) Two-phase hypergraph based reasoning with dynamic relations for multi-hop KBQA. In: ‘IJCAI’. IJCAI/AAAI Press 3615–3621

  13. Hao Y, Liu H, He S, Liu K, Zhao J (2018) Pattern-revising enhanced simple question answering over knowledge bases. In: ‘COLING’. ACL 3272–3282

  14. Hao Y, Zhang Y, Liu K, He S, Liu Z, Wu H, Zhao J (2017) An end-to-end model for question answering over knowledge base with cross-attention combining global knowledge. In: ‘ACL’. The Association for computer linguistics 221–231

  15. He H, Singh AK (2008) Graphs-at-a-time: query language and access methods for graph databases. In: ‘SIGMOD’. ACM 405–418

  16. He X, Golub D (2016) Character-level question answering with attention. In: ‘EMNLP’. The Association for computer linguistics 1598–1607

  17. Herzig J, Berant J (2018) Decoupling structure and lexicon for zero-shot semantic parsing. In: ‘EMNLP’. Association for Computational Linguistics 1619–1629

  18. Hu S, Zou L, Yu JX, Wang H, Zhao D (2018) Answering natural language questions by subgraph matching over knowledge graphs. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 30(5):824–837

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Huang X, Zhang J, Li D, Li P (2019) Knowledge graph embedding based question answering. In: ‘WSDM’. ACM 105–113

  20. Kim Y (2014) Convolutional neural networks for sentence classification. In: ‘EMNLP’. The Association for computer linguistics 1746–1751

  21. Lai S, Xu L, Liu K, Zhao J (2015) Recurrent convolutional neural networks for text classification. In: ‘AAAI’. AAAI Press 2267–2273

  22. Lan Y, Jiang J (2020) Query graph generation for answering multi-hop complex questions from knowledge bases. In: ‘ACL’. The Association for Computer Linguistics 969–974

  23. Lan Y, Wang S, Jiang J (2019a) Knowledge base question answering with a matching-aggregation model and question-specific contextual relations. IEEE/ACM Trans Audio Speech Lang Process 27(10):1629–1638

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Lan Y, Wang S, Jiang J (2019b) Knowledge base question answering with topic units. In: ‘IJCAI’. IJCAI/AAAI Press 5046–5052

  25. Lehmann J, Isele R, Jakob M, Jentzsch A, Kontokostas D, Mendes PN, Hellmann S, Morsey M, Van Kleef P, Auer S et al (2015) Dbpedia-a large-scale, multilingual knowledge base extracted from wikipedia. Semantic web 6(2):167–195

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Liu P, Qiu X, Huang X (2016) Recurrent neural network for text classification with multi-task learning. In: ‘IJCAI’. IJCAI/AAAI Press 2873–2879

  27. Lukovnikov D, Fischer A, Lehmann J (2019) Pretrained transformers for simple question answering over knowledge graphs. In: ‘ISWC’, Vol. 11778, Springer, pp 470–486

  28. Lukovnikov D, Fischer A, Lehmann J, Auer S (2017) Neural network-based question answering over knowledge graphs on word and character level In: ‘WWW’. ACM 1211–1220

  29. Mohammed S, Shi P, Lin J (2018) Strong baselines for simple question answering over knowledge graphs with and without neural networks. In: ‘NAACL’. The Association for Computer Linguistics 291–296

  30. Petrochuk M, Zettlemoyer L (2018) Simplequestions nearly solved: a new upperbound and baseline approach. In: ‘EMNLP’. The Association for Computer Linguistics 554–558

  31. Qu Y, Liu J, Kang L, Shi Q, Ye D (2018) ‘Question answering over freebase via attentive RNN with similarity matrix based CNN’. arXiv:1804.03317

  32. Shen T, Geng X, Qin T, Guo D, Tang D, Duan N, Long G, Jiang D (2019) Multi-task learning for conversational question answering over a large-scale knowledge base. In: ‘EMNLP’. Association for Computational Linguistics 2442–2451

  33. Su Y, Sun H, Sadler BM, Srivatsa M, Gur I, Yan Z, Yan X (2016) On generating characteristic-rich question sets for QA evaluation. In: ‘EMNLP’. The Association for Computer Linguistics 562–572

  34. Suchanek FM, Kasneci G, Weikum G (2007) Yago: a core of semantic knowledge. In: ‘WWW’. ACM 697–706

  35. Sun Y, Zhang L, Cheng G, Qu Y (2020) SPARQA: skeleton-based semantic parsing for complex questions over knowledge bases. In: ‘AAAI’. AAAI Press 8952–8959

  36. Trivedi, P., Maheshwari, G., Dubey, M. and Lehmann, J. ( 2017) , Lc-quad: A corpus for complex question answering over knowledge graphs, in ‘ISWC’, Vol. 10588, Springer, pp. 210–218

  37. Wang M, Liu J, Wei B, Yao S, Zeng H, Shi L (2019) Answering why-not questions on SPARQL queries. Knowl Inf Syst 58(1):169–208

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Wang Y, Zhang R, Xu C, Mao Y (2018) The APVA-TURBO approach to question answering in knowledge base. In: ‘COLING’. ACL 1998–2009

  39. Yih SW-T, Chang M-W, He X, Gao J (2015) Semantic parsing via staged query graph generation: question answering with knowledge base. In: ‘ACL’. The Association for Computer Linguistics 1321–1331

  40. Yin W, Yu M, Xiang B, Zhou B, Schütze H (2016) Simple question answering by attentive convolutional neural network. In: ‘COLING’. ACL 1746–1756

  41. Zhang Y, Dai H, Kozareva Z, Smola AJ, Song L (2018) Variational reasoning for question answering with knowledge graph. In: ‘AAAI’. AAAI Press 6069–6076

  42. Zhao W, Chung T, Goyal AK, Metallinou A (2019) Simple question answering with subgraph ranking and joint-scoring. In: ‘NAACL-HLT’. The Association for Computer Linguistics 324–334

  43. Zheng W, Yu JX, Zou L, Cheng H (2018) Question answering over knowledge graphs: question understanding via template decomposition. Proc VLDB Endow 11(11):1373–1386

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Zhou G, Xie Z, Yu Z, Huang JX (2021) DFM: a parameter-shared deep fused model for knowledge base question answering. Inf Sci 547:103–118

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61872163 and 61806084 and Jilin Provincial Education Department project under Grant No. JJKH20190160KJ.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lu Liu.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Hai Cui and Tao Peng: These authors contributed equally to this study and share first authorship.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Cui, H., Peng, T., Feng, L. et al. Simple Question Answering over Knowledge Graph Enhanced by Question Pattern Classification. Knowl Inf Syst 63, 2741–2761 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-021-01609-w

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-021-01609-w

Keywords

Navigation