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UniK-QA: Unified Representations of Structured and Unstructured Knowledge for Open-Domain Question Answering
Barlas Oguz, Xilun Chen, Vladimir Karpukhin, Stan Peshterliev, Dmytro Okhonko, Michael Schlichtkrull, Sonal Gupta, Yashar Mehdad, Scott Yih
We study open-domain question answering with structured, unstructured and semi-structured knowledge sources, including text, tables, lists and knowledge bases. Departing from prior work, we propose a unifying approach that homogenizes all sources by reducing them to text and applies the retriever-reader model which has so far been limited to text sources only. Our approach greatly improves the results on knowledge-base QA tasks by 11 points, compared to latest graph-based methods. More importantly, we demonstrate that our unified knowledge (UniK-QA) model is a simple and yet effective way to combine heterogeneous sources of knowledge, advancing the state-of-the-art results on two popular question answering benchmarks, NaturalQuestions and WebQuestions, by 3.5 and 2.6 points, respectively. The code of UniK-QA is available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/UniK-QA.
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Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Knowledge Base Question Answering | WebQuestionsSP | UniK-QA (T5-large) | Hits@1 | 79.1 | #4 of 8 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Knowledge Base Question Answering | WebQuestionsSP | UniK-QA (T5-base) | Hits@1 | 76.7 | #5 of 8 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Open-Domain Question Answering | Natural Questions | UniK-QA | Exact Match | 54.9 | #3 of 5 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Open-Domain Question Answering | TQA | UniK-QA | Exact Match | 65.5 | #1 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Open-Domain Question Answering | WebQuestions | UniK-QA | Exact Match | 57.7 | #1 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | Natural Questions (long) | UniK-QA | EM | 54.9 | #11 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | TIQ | Unik-Qa | P@1 | 42.5 | #3 of 9 | 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.
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