{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/rag-based-question-answering-over","title":"RAG-based Question Answering over Heterogeneous Data and Text","arxiv_id":"2412.07420","date":"2024-12-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Philipp Christmann","Gerhard Weikum"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07420v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07420v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"answer-generation","task_name":"Answer Generation"},{"task_slug":"knowledge-graphs","task_name":"Knowledge Graphs"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"rag","task_name":"RAG"},{"task_slug":"re-ranking","task_name":"Re-Ranking"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"cosine-annealing","method_name":"Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"discriminative-fine-tuning","method_name":"Discriminative Fine-Tuning"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gpt","method_name":"GPT"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-cosine-annealing","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[{"leaderboard":"/sota/question-answering-on-timequestions","task":"Question Answering","dataset":"TimeQuestions","model":"Quasar","rank_in_archive_order":2,"of":21,"metrics":{"P@1":"75.4"},"uses_additional_data":false}],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2412.07420","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}