# MST5 -- Multilingual Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06041 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06041/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02054/) (2019)
- [Bidirectional LSTM-CRF Models for Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01991/) (2015)
- [QALD-9-plus: A Multilingual Dataset for Question Answering over DBpedia and Wikidata Translated by Native Speakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00120/) (2022)
- [Modern Baselines for SPARQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12793/) (2022)
- [Towards a Question Answering System over the Semantic Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00832/) (2018)
- [Knowledge Graph Question Answering using Graph-Pattern Isomorphism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06752/) (2021)
- [Neural Machine Translation for Query Construction and Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10478/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Text2Cypher Across Languages: Evaluating and Finetuning LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21445/) (2025)
- [MultiHal: Multilingual Dataset for Knowledge-Graph Grounded Evaluation of LLM Hallucinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14101/) (2025)
- [Text-to-SPARQL Goes Beyond English: Multilingual Question Answering Over Knowledge Graphs through Human-Inspired Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16971/) (2025)
- [FactNet: A Billion-Scale Knowledge Graph for Multilingual Factual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03417/) (2026)
- [MARS: Multi-hop Adaptive Retrieval and SPARQL Generation for KGQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14561/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) simplifies querying vast amounts of knowledge stored in a graph-based model using natural language. However, the research has largely concentrated on English, putting non-English speakers at a disadvantage. Meanwhile, existing multilingual KGQA systems face challenges in achieving performance comparable to English systems, highlighting the difficulty of generating SPARQL queries from diverse languages. In this research, we propose a simplified approach to enhance multilingual KGQA systems by incorporating linguistic context and entity information directly into the processing pipeline of a language model. Unlike existing methods that rely on separate encoders for integrating auxiliary information, our strategy leverages a single, pretrained multilingual transformer-based language model to manage both the primary input and the auxiliary data. Our methodology significantly improves the language model's ability to accurately convert a natural language query into a relevant SPARQL query. It demonstrates promising results on the most recent QALD datasets, namely QALD-9-Plus and QALD-10. Furthermore, we introduce and evaluate our approach on Chinese and Japanese, thereby expanding the language diversity of the existing datasets.