EDG-Based Question Decomposition for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Bases

Xixin Hu, Yiheng Shu, Xiang Huang, Yuzhong Qu

Abstract: Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) aims at automatically answering factoid questions over knowledge bases (KBs). For complex questions that require multiple KB relations or constraints, KBQA faces many challenges including question understanding, component linking (e.g., entity, relation, and type linking), and query composition. In this paper, we propose a novel graph structure called Entity Description Graph (EDG) to represent the structure of complex questions, which can help alleviate the above issues. By leveraging the EDG structure of given questions, we implement a QA system over DBpedia, called EDGQA. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDGQA outperforms state-of-the-art results on both LC-QuAD and QALD-9, and that EDG-based decomposition is a feasible way for complex question answering over KBs.