Papers › RAG-based Question Answering over Heterogeneous Data and Text

RAG-based Question Answering over Heterogeneous Data and Text

10 Dec 2024arXiv:2412.07420archive 2025-07-28

Philipp Christmann, Gerhard Weikum

This article presents the QUASAR system for question answering over unstructured text, structured tables, and knowledge graphs, with unified treatment of all sources. The system adopts a RAG-based architecture, with a pipeline of evidence retrieval followed by answer generation, with the latter powered by a moderate-sized language model. Additionally and uniquely, QUASAR has components for question understanding, to derive crisper input for evidence retrieval, and for re-ranking and filtering the retrieved evidence before feeding the most informative pieces into the answer generation. Experiments with three different benchmarks demonstrate the high answering quality of our approach, being on par with or better than large GPT models, while keeping the computational cost and energy consumption orders of magnitude lower.

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Tasks

Answer GenerationKnowledge GraphsLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingQuestion AnsweringRAGRe-RankingRetrieval

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Question Answering TimeQuestions Quasar P@1 75.4 #2 of 21 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDiscriminative Fine-TuningDropoutGPTLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight Decay

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