# Bidirectional Attentive Memory Networks for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.02188 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02188/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [UniKGQA: Unified Retrieval and Reasoning for Solving Multi-hop Question Answering Over Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00959/) (2022)
- [Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13296/) (2022)
- [EDT: Improving Large Language Models' Generation by Entropy-based Dynamic Temperature Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14541/) (2024)
- [Personalized Food Recommendation as Constrained Question Answering over a Large-scale Food Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01775/) (2021)
- [UNIQORN: Unified Question Answering over RDF Knowledge Graphs and Natural Language Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08614/) (2021)
- [Recall and Learn: A Memory-augmented Solver for Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13112/) (2021)
- [QRelScore: Better Evaluating Generated Questions with Deeper Understanding of Context-aware Relevance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13921/) (2022)
- [Graph-augmented Learning to Rank for Querying Large-scale Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10541/) (2021)
- [EPERM: An Evidence Path Enhanced Reasoning Model for Knowledge Graph Question and Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16171/) (2025)
- [A Neural Question Answering System for Basic Questions about Subroutines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03999/) (2021)
- [A Novel DeBERTa-based Model for Financial Question Answering Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05875/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Pretraining for Fact Verification by Language Model Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16540/) (2023)
- [PeCoQ: A Dataset for Persian Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14167/) (2021)
- [Attention-based Aspect Reasoning for Knowledge Base Question Answering on Clinical Notes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00513/) (2021)
- [Injecting Numerical Reasoning Skills into Knowledge Base Question Answering Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06109/) (2021)
- [Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion with GNNs and Rules: An Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07942/) (2023)
- [Fact-Tree Reasoning for N-ary Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08297/) (2021)
- [TransERR: Translation-based Knowledge Graph Embedding via Efficient Relation Rotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14580/) (2023)
- [Multi-view Contrastive Learning for Entity Typing over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12008/) (2023)
- [Multi-Clue Reasoning with Memory Augmentation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12723/) (2023)
- [Question-Aware Memory Network for Multi-hop Question Answering in Human-Robot Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13173/) (2021)
- [SkillQG: Learning to Generate Question for Reading Comprehension Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04737/) (2023)
- [MARC: Multimodal and Multi-Task Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Cold-Start Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08181/) (2025)
- [A Knowledge-based Approach for Answering Complex Questions in Persian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02040/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Rich Syntax for Better Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07940/) (2021)
- [Path-Enhanced Multi-Relational Question Answering with Knowledge Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15622/) (2021)
- [Better Query Graph Selection for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12662/) (2022)
- [A Method of Query Graph Reranking for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12808/) (2022)
- [COTET: Cross-view Optimal Transport for Knowledge Graph Entity Typing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13602/) (2024)
- [LLM-Assisted Modeling of Semantic Web-Enabled Multi-Agents Systems with AJAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06911/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When answering natural language questions over knowledge bases (KBs), different question components and KB aspects play different roles. However, most existing embedding-based methods for knowledge base question answering (KBQA) ignore the subtle inter-relationships between the question and the KB (e.g., entity types, relation paths and context). In this work, we propose to directly model the two-way flow of interactions between the questions and the KB via a novel Bidirectional Attentive Memory Network, called BAMnet. Requiring no external resources and only very few hand-crafted features, on the WebQuestions benchmark, our method significantly outperforms existing information-retrieval based methods, and remains competitive with (hand-crafted) semantic parsing based methods. Also, since we use attention mechanisms, our method offers better interpretability compared to other baselines.