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Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases

arXiv 2110.05743 ↗First posted 12 Oct 2021cs.AIcited by 34

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Abstract (arXiv)

Program induction for answering complex questions over knowledge bases (KBs) aims to decompose a question into a multi-step program, whose execution against the KB produces the final answer. Learning to induce programs relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs for the given KB. However, for most KBs, the gold program annotations are usually lacking, making learning difficult. In this paper, we propose the approach of program transfer, which aims to leverage the valuable program annotations on the rich-resourced KBs as external supervision signals to aid program induction for the low-resourced KBs that lack program annotations. For program transfer, we design a novel two-stage parsing framework with an efficient ontology-guided pruning strategy. First, a sketch parser translates the question into a high-level program sketch, which is the composition of functions. Second, given the question and sketch, an argument parser searches the detailed arguments from the KB for functions. During the searching, we incorporate the KB ontology to prune the search space. The experiments on ComplexWebQuestions and WebQuestionSP show that our method outperforms SOTA methods significantly, demonstrating the effectiveness of program transfer and our framework. Our codes and datasets can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/ProgramTransfer.

Key facts. Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 26 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2021.

Builds on

26 of 49 references.

References · 26

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  4. 2014On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approachescited by 1,304
  5. 2018The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questionscited by 410
  6. 2016Key-Value Memory Networks for Directly Reading Documentscited by 223
  7. 2019PullNet: Open Domain Question Answering with Iterative Retrieval on Knowledge Bases and Textcited by 184
  8. 2017Variational Reasoning for Question Answering with Knowledge Graphcited by 170
  9. 2018Open Domain Question Answering Using Early Fusion of Knowledge Bases and Textcited by 168
  10. 2016Language to Logical Form with Neural Attentioncited by 158
  11. 2016Neural Symbolic Machines: Learning Semantic Parsers on Freebase with Weak Supervisioncited by 103
  12. 2021Improving Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering by Learning Intermediate Supervision Signalscited by 101
14 more
  1. 2021A Survey on Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering: Methods, Challenges and Solutionscited by 78
  2. 2020Low-Resource Domain Adaptation for Compositional Task-Oriented Semantic Parsingcited by 72
  3. 2021TransferNet: An Effective and Transparent Framework for Multi-hop Question Answering over Relation Graphcited by 60
  4. 2014Question Answering with Subgraph Embeddingscited by 58
  5. 2019Linguistic generalization and compositionality in modern artificial neural networkscited by 58
  6. 2021Leveraging Language to Learn Program Abstractions and Search Heuristicscited by 45
  7. 2016Question Answering on Freebase via Relation Extraction and Textual Evidencecited by 39
  8. 2013Lambda Dependency-Based Compositional Semanticscited by 26
  9. 2017Cross-domain Semantic Parsing via Paraphrasingcited by 19
  10. 2017Learning Structured Natural Language Representations for Semantic Parsingcited by 15
  11. 2016Learning a Natural Language Interface with Neural Programmercited by 14
  12. 2017Neural Semantic Parsing over Multiple Knowledge-basescited by 8
  13. 2017Transfer Learning for Neural Semantic Parsingcited by 5
  14. 2019Zero-Shot Semantic Parsing for Instructionscited by 4

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Citing papers per year: 2022: 5; 2023: 19; 2024: 5; 2025: 3; 2026: 2.

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  1. 2023Think-on-Graph: Deep and Responsible Reasoning of Large Language Model on Knowledge Graphcited by 238
  2. 2022DecAF: Joint Decoding of Answers and Logical Forms for Question Answering over Knowledge Basescited by 84
  3. 2022TIARA: Multi-grained Retrieval for Robust Question Answering over Large Knowledge Basescited by 59
  4. 2022Don't Generate, Discriminate: A Proposal for Grounding Language Models to Real-World Environmentscited by 57
  5. 2023KnowledGPT: Enhancing Large Language Models with Retrieval and Storage Access on Knowledge Basescited by 52
  6. 2023FlexKBQA: A Flexible LLM-Powered Framework for Few-Shot Knowledge Base Question Answeringcited by 51
  7. 2023ChatKBQA: A Generate-then-Retrieve Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering with Fine-tuned Large Language Modelscited by 44
  8. 2024SPINACH: SPARQL-Based Information Navigation for Challenging Real-World Questionscited by 27
  9. 2023FC-KBQA: A Fine-to-Coarse Composition Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answeringcited by 21
  10. 2023Information Screening whilst Exploiting! Multimodal Relation Extraction with Feature Denoising and Multimodal Topic Modelingcited by 16
  11. 2022GraphQ IR: Unifying the Semantic Parsing of Graph Query Languages with One Intermediate Representationcited by 13
  12. 2023SUQL: Conversational Search over Structured and Unstructured Data with Large Language Modelscited by 13
22 more
  1. 2023Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree for Explainable Question Answeringcited by 11
  2. 2023Knowledge Crosswords: Geometric Knowledge Reasoning with Large Language Modelscited by 11
  3. 2025FRAG: A Flexible Modular Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation based on Knowledge Graphscited by 8
  4. 2025Beyond Seen Data: Improving KBQA Generalization Through Schema-Guided Logical Form Generationcited by 8
  5. 2022Do I have the Knowledge to Answer? Investigating Answerability of Knowledge Base Questionscited by 7
  6. 2023Pay More Attention to Relation Exploration for Knowledge Base Question Answeringcited by 7
  7. 2023Few-shot Transfer Learning for Knowledge Base Question Answering: Fusing Supervised Models with In-Context Learningcited by 6
  8. 2024How Proficient Are Large Language Models in Formal Languages? An In-Depth Insight for Knowledge Base Question Answeringcited by 5
  9. 2025RJE: A Retrieval-Judgment-Exploration Framework for Efficient Knowledge Graph Question Answering with LLMscited by 4
  10. 2023Knowledge Base Question Answering for Space Debris Queriescited by 3
  11. 2023Data Distribution Bottlenecks in Grounding Language Models to Knowledge Basescited by 3
  12. 2023ProKD: An Unsupervised Prototypical Knowledge Distillation Network for Zero-Resource Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognitioncited by 2
  13. 2023Fine-tuned LLMs Know More, Hallucinate Less with Few-Shot Sequence-to-Sequence Semantic Parsing over Wikidatacited by 2
  14. 2023VisKoP: Visual Knowledge oriented Programming for Interactive Knowledge Base Question Answeringcited by 2
  15. 2024RetinaQA: A Robust Knowledge Base Question Answering Model for both Answerable and Unanswerable Questionscited by 2
  16. 2023From Parse-Execute to Parse-Execute-Refine: Improving Semantic Parser for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Basecited by 1
  17. 2023Relation-Aware Question Answering for Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphscited by 1
  18. 2024KB-Plugin: A Plug-and-play Framework for Large Language Models to Induce Programs over Low-resourced Knowledge Basescited by 1
  19. 2024Iterative Repair with Weak Verifiers for Few-shot Transfer in KBQA with Unanswerabilitycited by 1
  20. 2026GAPD: Gold-Action Policy Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning in Knowledge Base Question Answeringcited by 1
  21. 2023GNN2R: Weakly-Supervised Rationale-Providing Question Answering over Knowledge Graphscited by 0
  22. 2026CacheRAG: A Semantic Caching System for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Knowledge Graph Question Answeringcited by 0