A Zero-Shot Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Complex Knowledge Graph Question Answering
Prerna Agarwal, Srikanta Bedathur
Abstract
Existing low-resource Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) methods rely heavily on Large Language Models (LLMs) for semantic parsing of natural language question to its corresponding logical form (LF) such as SPARQL, S-Expression, etc. However, LLMs becomes bottleneck for practical applications due to: (i) its high computational resource requirements; (2) limited knowledge of LLM about different LFs; (3) unavailability of low-resource annotated data for new KGs and settings. This motivates us to design a KGQA framework that can operate in a zero-shot setting without the need for additional resources. In this paper, we propose (NS-KGQA): a zero-shot neuro-symbolic approach based on neural KG embeddings that have demonstrated their ability to effectively model KG structure without the need of additional data. We extract a link-prediction based symbolic question subgraph. We then propose a Symbolic Resolver that uses Dual KG Embeddings combined with a symbolic approach to resolve the symbolic question subgraph. Our extensive experiments on Complex KGQA benchmarks such as KQA Pro demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. NS-KGQA outperforms all other LLM-based zero-shot baselines by 26% (avg).
BibTeX
@inproceedings{emnlp2025_azeroshotneurosy,
title = {A Zero-Shot Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Complex Knowledge Graph Question Answering},
author = {Prerna Agarwal and Srikanta Bedathur},
booktitle = {EMNLP 2025},
year = {2025}
}