mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Do I have the Knowledge to Answer? Investigating Answerability of Knowledge Base Questions

arXiv 2212.10189 ↗First posted 20 Dec 2022cs.CL cs.AIcited by 7

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

When answering natural language questions over knowledge bases, missing facts, incomplete schema and limited scope naturally lead to many questions being unanswerable. While answerability has been explored in other QA settings, it has not been studied for QA over knowledge bases (KBQA). We create GrailQAbility, a new benchmark KBQA dataset with unanswerability, by first identifying various forms of KB incompleteness that make questions unanswerable, and then systematically adapting GrailQA (a popular KBQA dataset with only answerable questions). Experimenting with three state-of-the-art KBQA models, we find that all three models suffer a drop in performance even after suitable adaptation for unanswerable questions. In addition, these often detect unanswerability for wrong reasons and find specific forms of unanswerability particularly difficult to handle. This underscores the need for further research in making KBQA systems robust to unanswerability

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 22 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2022.

Builds on

22 of 39 references.

References · 22

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  2. 2019PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Librarycited by 20,305
  3. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  4. 2018Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuADcited by 1,554
  5. 2018CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challengecited by 683
  6. 2018The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questionscited by 410
  7. 2018QuAC : Question Answering in Contextcited by 381
  8. 2019PullNet: Open Domain Question Answering with Iterative Retrieval on Knowledge Bases and Textcited by 184
  9. 2020Beyond I.I.D.: Three Levels of Generalization for Question Answering on Knowledge Basescited by 171
  10. 2018Training Millions of Personalized Dialogue Agentscited by 126
  11. 2021Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Basescited by 107
  12. 2022Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answeringcited by 93
10 more
  1. 2021RnG-KBQA: Generation Augmented Iterative Ranking for Knowledge Base Question Answeringcited by 86
  2. 2020KQA Pro: A Dataset with Explicit Compositional Programs for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Basecited by 78
  3. 2022Sequence-to-Sequence Knowledge Graph Completion and Question Answeringcited by 75
  4. 2022TIARA: Multi-grained Retrieval for Robust Question Answering over Large Knowledge Basescited by 59
  5. 2022QALD-9-plus: A Multilingual Dataset for Question Answering over DBpedia and Wikidata Translated by Native Speakerscited by 39
  6. 2021Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Basescited by 34
  7. 2022Knowledge Base Question Answering by Case-based Reasoning over Subgraphscited by 31
  8. 2020Bootleg: Chasing the Tail with Self-Supervised Named Entity Disambiguationcited by 24
  9. 2022CBR-iKB: A Case-Based Reasoning Approach for Question Answering over Incomplete Knowledge Basescited by 6
  10. 2022Know What I don't Know: Handling Ambiguous and Unanswerable Questions for Text-to-SQLcited by 6

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 3; 2025: 0; 2026: 2.

7 papers.

  1. 2024Don't Hallucinate, Abstain: Identifying LLM Knowledge Gaps via Multi-LLM Collaborationcited by 180
  2. 2023Knowledge Crosswords: Geometric Knowledge Reasoning with Large Language Modelscited by 11
  3. 2023Few-shot Transfer Learning for Knowledge Base Question Answering: Fusing Supervised Models with In-Context Learningcited by 6
  4. 2024RetinaQA: A Robust Knowledge Base Question Answering Model for both Answerable and Unanswerable Questionscited by 2
  5. 2024Iterative Repair with Weak Verifiers for Few-shot Transfer in KBQA with Unanswerabilitycited by 1
  6. 2026When Correct Edges Cannot Be Verified: A Provenance Gap in Incomplete KGQA and a Provenance-Favoring Completion Policycited by 0
  7. 2026AutoSchema: Live Schema Grounding for Agentic Text-to-Sparql over Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphscited by 0