KaeDe: Progressive Generation of Logical Forms via Knowledge-Aware Question Decomposition for Improved KBQA

Abstract

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) refers to the task of answering natural language questions using large-scale structured knowledge bases (KBs). Existing semantic parsing-based (SP-based) methods achieve superior performance by directly converting questions into structured logical form (LF) queries using fine-tuned large language models (LLMs). However, these methods face the key challenge of difficulty in directly generating LFs for complex graph structures, which often leads to non-executable LFs that negatively impact overall KBQA performance. To address this challenge, we propose KaeDe, a novel generate-then-retrieve method for KBQA. This approach integrates knowledge-aware question decomposition and subsequent progressive LF generation within the generation phase, followed by an unsupervised retrieval phase. Specifically, the original question is decomposed into simplified, topic entity-centric sub-questions and explanations within the KB context. Path-level LFs are derived from these intermediate expressions and then combined into a comprehensive graph-level LF. Finally, the LF is refined through unsupervised entity and relation retrieval. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on WebQuestionSP (WebQSP) and ComplexWebQuestions (CWQ) benchmarks, particularly with fewer model parameters.