Improving Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering with Relation-Aware Subgraph Retrieval and Reasoning Network

Abstract

Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering aims to answer a complex question over a Knowledge Base. A mainstream solution is based on information retrieval, which usually extracts a pivotal subgraph from entire Knowledge Base to locate candidate answers, and then determines the plausible answers with semantic matching between candidate answers and the question. However, such a paradigm can have two critical problems: 1) Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering can be sensitive to the subgraph, since a small subgraph may exclude the answers, while a large one may introduce a lot of noise; 2) directly deriving answers with semantic matching neglects the global topology in the Knowledge Base, which may limit the capability in answer reasoning. To tackle above challenges, we propose the Relation-Aware Subgraph Retrieval and Reasoning Network, where relations are emphasized to construct subgraphs and answer reasoning. Specifically, we present a Relation-Aware Subgraph Retrieval (RASR) method to initialize and prune subgraphs with the guidance of relation semantics. To compre-hensively understand the complex correlations between the question and candidate answers, we put forward a Relation-Aware Reasoning Network (RARN), which contains a text reasoning module focusing on the semantics understanding of the question and a graph reasoning module focusing on mining the topology between the topic entities and the answers. Experiments on two classical benchmark datasets show that our reasoning model outperforms the state-of-the-art results of Information Retrieval models. What's more, data statistical analysis on the subgraphs demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed subgraph retrieval method.