# Interactive Query Answering on Knowledge Graphs with Soft Entity Constraints

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13663 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13663/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [Complex Embeddings for Simple Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06357/) (2016)
- [RotatE: Knowledge Graph Embedding by Relational Rotation in Complex Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10197/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Graphs: Representation, Acquisition and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00388/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02320/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Deep Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00236/) (2020)
- [A Review of Relational Machine Learning for Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00759/) (2015)
- [Query2box: Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs in Vector Space using Box Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05969/) (2020)
- [Canonical Tensor Decomposition for Knowledge Base Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07297/) (2018)
- [Beta Embeddings for Multi-Hop Logical Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11465/) (2020)
- [Embedding Logical Queries on Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01445/) (2018)
- [RNNLogic: Learning Logic Rules for Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04029/) (2020)
- [Complex Query Answering with Neural Link Predictors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03459/) (2020)
- [Inductive Entity Representations from Text via Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03496/) (2020)
- [Neural-Symbolic Models for Logical Queries on Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10128/) (2022)
- [Relation Prediction as an Auxiliary Training Objective for Improving Multi-Relational Graph Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02834/) (2021)
- [Answering Complex Logical Queries on Knowledge Graphs via Query Computation Tree Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09567/) (2022)
- [Logical Message Passing Networks with One-hop Inference on Atomic Formulas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08859/) (2023)
- [SMORE: Knowledge Graph Completion and Multi-hop Reasoning in Massive Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14890/) (2021)
- [Adapting Neural Link Predictors for Data-Efficient Complex Query Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12313/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Complex Queries on Knowledge Graphs with Neural Link Predictors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07063/) (2023)
- [Graph-Embedding Empowered Entity Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02843/) (2020)
- [Deep Active Alignment of Knowledge Graph Entities and Schemata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04389/) (2023)
- [Listwise Learning to Rank by Exploring Unique Ratings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01828/) (2020)
- [A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Answering Graph Pattern Queries in Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04598/) (2023)
- [Seeing the advantage: visually grounding word embeddings to better capture human semantic knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10292/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Methods for query answering over incomplete knowledge graphs retrieve entities that are likely to be answers, which is particularly useful when such answers cannot be reached by direct graph traversal due to missing edges. However, existing approaches have focused on queries formalized using first-order-logic. In practice, many real-world queries involve constraints that are inherently vague or context-dependent, such as preferences for attributes or related categories. Addressing this gap, we introduce the problem of query answering with soft constraints. We formalize the problem and introduce two efficient methods designed to adjust query answer scores by incorporating soft constraints without disrupting the original answers to a query. These methods are lightweight, requiring tuning only two parameters or a small neural network trained to capture soft constraints while maintaining the original ranking structure. To evaluate the task, we extend existing QA benchmarks by generating datasets with soft constraints. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods can capture soft constraints while maintaining robust query answering performance and adding very little overhead. With our work, we explore a new and flexible way to interact with graph databases that allows users to specify their preferences by providing examples interactively.