mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Complex Temporal Question Answering on Knowledge Graphs

arXiv 2109.08935 ↗First posted 18 Sep 2021cs.IR cs.CLcited by 69

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Abstract (arXiv)

Question answering over knowledge graphs (KG-QA) is a vital topic in IR. Questions with temporal intent are a special class of practical importance, but have not received much attention in research. This work presents EXAQT, the first end-to-end system for answering complex temporal questions that have multiple entities and predicates, and associated temporal conditions. EXAQT answers natural language questions over KGs in two stages, one geared towards high recall, the other towards precision at top ranks. The first step computes question-relevant compact subgraphs within the KG, and judiciously enhances them with pertinent temporal facts, using Group Steiner Trees and fine-tuned BERT models. The second step constructs relational graph convolutional networks (R-GCNs) from the first step's output, and enhances the R-GCNs with time-aware entity embeddings and attention over temporal relations. We evaluate EXAQT on TimeQuestions, a large dataset of 16k temporal questions we compiled from a variety of general purpose KG-QA benchmarks. Results show that EXAQT outperforms three state-of-the-art systems for answering complex questions over KGs, thereby justifying specialized treatment of temporal QA.

Key facts. Cited by 69 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 26 of its 81 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2021.

Builds on

26 of 81 references.

References · 26

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  8. 2019PullNet: Open Domain Question Answering with Iterative Retrieval on Knowledge Bases and Textcited by 184
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14 more
  1. 2019Diachronic Embedding for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completioncited by 104
  2. 2021Question Answering Over Temporal Knowledge Graphscited by 99
  3. 2020Efficient One-Pass End-to-End Entity Linking for Questionscited by 76
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  5. 2020UniK-QA: Unified Representations of Structured and Unstructured Knowledge for Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 61
  6. 2019TEQUILA: Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Basescited by 47
  7. 2018ComQA: A Community-sourced Dataset for Complex Factoid Question Answering with Paraphrase Clusterscited by 29
  8. 2020Event-QA: A Dataset for Event-Centric Question Answering over Knowledge Graphscited by 26
  9. 2019Message Passing for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Graphscited by 24
  10. 2019Answering Complex Questions by Joining Multi-Document Evidence with Quasi Knowledge Graphscited by 21
  11. 2021Reinforcement Learning from Reformulations in Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphscited by 18
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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 2; 2022: 12; 2023: 12; 2024: 19; 2025: 14; 2026: 10.

69 papers.

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  1. 2022StreamingQA: A Benchmark for Adaptation to New Knowledge over Time in Question Answering Modelscited by 126
  2. 2024Test of Time: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Temporal Reasoningcited by 88
  3. 2023MindMap: Knowledge Graph Prompting Sparks Graph of Thoughts in Large Language Modelscited by 73
  4. 2023Towards Benchmarking and Improving the Temporal Reasoning Capability of Large Language Modelscited by 37
  5. 2022Modern Baselines for SPARQL Semantic Parsingcited by 34
  6. 2025Large Language Models Meet Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering: Synthesis and Opportunitiescited by 31
  7. 2023Time-aware Multiway Adaptive Fusion Network for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answeringcited by 27
  8. 2023TempTabQA: Temporal Question Answering for Semi-Structured Tablescited by 27
  9. 2021TempoQR: Temporal Question Reasoning over Knowledge Graphscited by 26
  10. 2022Improving Time Sensitivity for Question Answering over Temporal Knowledge Graphscited by 26
  11. 2022Conversational Question Answering on Heterogeneous Sourcescited by 26
  12. 2024Question Calibration and Multi-Hop Modeling for Temporal Question Answeringcited by 25
38 more
  1. 2024Set the Clock: Temporal Alignment of Pretrained Language Modelscited by 25
  2. 2024Two-stage Generative Question Answering on Temporal Knowledge Graph Using Large Language Modelscited by 18
  3. 2025ChronoSense: Exploring Temporal Understanding in Large Language Models with Time Intervals of Eventscited by 18
  4. 2024MRAG: A Modular Retrieval Framework for Time-Sensitive Question Answeringcited by 17
  5. 2024PAT-Questions: A Self-Updating Benchmark for Present-Anchored Temporal Question-Answeringcited by 15
  6. 2025TempRetriever: Fusion-based Temporal Dense Passage Retrieval for Time-Sensitive Questionscited by 15
  7. 2022Knowledge Graph Question Answering Leaderboard: A Community Resource to Prevent a Replication Crisiscited by 14
  8. 2023Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questionscited by 14
  9. 2025It's High Time: A Survey of Temporal Question Answeringcited by 14
  10. 2022Relation Extraction as Open-book Examination: Retrieval-enhanced Prompt Tuningcited by 13
  11. 2022Knowledge Graph Question Answering Datasets and Their Generalizability: Are They Enough for Future Research?cited by 13
  12. 2024Faithful Temporal Question Answering over Heterogeneous Sourcescited by 13
  13. 2024EvoWiki: Evaluating LLMs on Evolving Knowledgecited by 13
  14. 2023EFOk-CQA: Towards Knowledge Graph Complex Query Answering beyond Set Operationcited by 12
  15. 2023Once Upon a textitTime in textitGraph: Relative-Time Pretraining for Complex Temporal Reasoningcited by 11
  16. 2022TwiRGCN: Temporally Weighted Graph Convolution for Question Answering over Temporal Knowledge Graphscited by 10
  17. 2022A Benchmark for Generalizable and Interpretable Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Basescited by 9
  18. 2022ForecastTKGQuestions: A Benchmark for Temporal Question Answering and Forecasting over Temporal Knowledge Graphscited by 9
  19. 2024Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering: A Surveycited by 9
  20. 2024Enhancing Temporal Sensitivity and Reasoning for Time-Sensitive Question Answeringcited by 9
  21. 2024Enhancing Temporal Understanding in LLMs for Semi-structured Tablescited by 8
  22. 2025Hypothesis-Driven Feature Manifold Analysis in LLMs via Supervised Multi-Dimensional Scalingcited by 8
  23. 2022Interactive Question Answering Systems: Literature Reviewcited by 7
  24. 2024RAG-based Question Answering over Heterogeneous Data and Textcited by 7
  25. 2023GETT-QA: Graph Embedding based T2T Transformer for Knowledge Graph Question Answeringcited by 6
  26. 2023Glitter or Gold? Deriving Structured Insights from Sustainability Reports via Large Language Modelscited by 6
  27. 2024Joint Multi-Facts Reasoning Network For Complex Temporal Question Answering Over Knowledge Graphcited by 6
  28. 2024Self-Improvement Programming for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answeringcited by 5
  29. 2025TimelineKGQA: A Comprehensive Question-Answer Pair Generator for Temporal Knowledge Graphscited by 5
  30. 2026Temp-R1: A Unified Autonomous Agent for Complex Temporal KGQA via Reverse Curriculum Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
  31. 2022Semantic Framework based Query Generation for Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Graphscited by 3
  32. 2023Fusing Temporal Graphs into Transformers for Time-Sensitive Question Answeringcited by 3
  33. 2025TRAVELER: A Benchmark for Evaluating Temporal Reasoning across Vague, Implicit and Explicit Referencescited by 3
  34. 2024Temporally Consistent Factuality Probing for Large Language Modelscited by 2
  35. 2025Plan of Knowledge: Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answeringcited by 2
  36. 2026Efficient Temporal-aware Matryoshka Adaptation for Temporal Information Retrievalcited by 2
  37. 2024Semantic Parsing with Candidate Expressions for Knowledge Base Question Answeringcited by 1
  38. 2025A Multi-Expert Structural-Semantic Hybrid Framework for Unveiling Historical Patterns in Temporal Knowledge Graphscited by 1

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