Papers › An Empirical Study of Pre-trained Language Models in Simple Knowledge Graph Question Answering

An Empirical Study of Pre-trained Language Models in Simple Knowledge Graph Question Answering

18 Mar 2023arXiv:2303.10368archive 2025-07-28

Nan Hu, Yike Wu, Guilin Qi, Dehai Min, Jiaoyan Chen, Jeff Z. Pan, Zafar Ali

Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as BERT have recently achieved great success and become a milestone in natural language processing (NLP). It is now the consensus of the NLP community to adopt PLMs as the backbone for downstream tasks. In recent works on knowledge graph question answering (KGQA), BERT or its variants have become necessary in their KGQA models. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive research and comparison of the performance of different PLMs in KGQA. To this end, we summarize two basic KGQA frameworks based on PLMs without additional neural network modules to compare the performance of nine PLMs in terms of accuracy and efficiency. In addition, we present three benchmarks for larger-scale KGs based on the popular SimpleQuestions benchmark to investigate the scalability of PLMs. We carefully analyze the results of all PLMs-based KGQA basic frameworks on these benchmarks and two other popular datasets, WebQuestionSP and FreebaseQA, and find that knowledge distillation techniques and knowledge enhancement methods in PLMs are promising for KGQA. Furthermore, we test ChatGPT, which has drawn a great deal of attention in the NLP community, demonstrating its impressive capabilities and limitations in zero-shot KGQA. We have released the code and benchmarks to promote the use of PLMs on KGQA.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.

Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

aannonymouuss/plms-in-practical-kbqa officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Graph Question AnsweringKnowledge DistillationQuestion Answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutKnowledge DistillationLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTestWeight DecayWordPiece

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections