Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
research-article

CBench: towards better evaluation of question answering over knowledge graphs

Published: 01 April 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increase in the number of knowledge graphs that can be only queried by experts. However, describing questions using structured queries is not straightforward for non-expert users who need to have sufficient knowledge about both the vocabulary and the structure of the queried knowledge graph, as well as the syntax of the structured query language used to describe the user's information needs. The most popular approach introduced to overcome the aforementioned challenges is to use natural language to query these knowledge graphs. Although several question answering benchmarks can be used to evaluate question-answering systems over a number of popular knowledge graphs, choosing a benchmark to accurately assess the quality of a question answering system is a challenging task.
In this paper, we introduce CBench, an extensible, and more informative benchmarking suite for analyzing benchmarks and evaluating question answering systems. CBench can be used to analyze existing benchmarks with respect to several fine-grained linguistic, syntactic, and structural properties of the questions and queries in the benchmark. We show that existing benchmarks vary significantly with respect to these properties deeming choosing a small subset of them unreliable in evaluating QA systems. Until further research improves the quality and comprehensiveness of benchmarks, CBench can be used to facilitate this evaluation using a set of popular benchmarks that can be augmented with other user-provided benchmarks. CBench not only evaluates a question answering system based on popular single-number metrics but also gives a detailed analysis of the linguistic, syntactic, and structural properties of answered and unanswered questions to better help the developers of question answering systems to better understand where their system excels and where it struggles.

References

[1]
SPARQL 1.1 query language. http://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/, 2013.
[2]
RDF 1.1 concepts and abstract syntax. http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-rdf11-concepts-20140225/, 2014.
[3]
A. Abujabal, R. Saha Roy, M. Yahya, and G. Weikum. ComQA: A community-sourced dataset for complex factoid question answering with paraphrase clusters. In Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HL), 2019.
[4]
A. Abujabal, M. Yahya, M. Riedewald, and G. Weikum. Automated template generation for question answering over knowledge graphs. In Proceedings of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2017.
[5]
A. Akbik, D. Blythe, and R. Vollgraf. Contextual string embeddings for sequence labeling. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2018.
[6]
S. Auer, C. Bizer, G. Kobilarov, J. Lehmann, R. Cyganiak, and Z. Ives. DBpedia: A nucleus for a web of open data. In Proceedings of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC). 2007.
[7]
M. Azmy, P. Shi, J. Lin, and I. Ilyas. Farewell Freebase: Migrating the simple-questions dataset to dbpedia. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2018.
[8]
J. Berant, A. Chou, R. Frostig, and P. Liang. Semantic parsing on Freebase from question-answer pairs. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2013.
[9]
K. Bollacker, C. Evans, P. Paritosh, T. Sturge, and J. Taylor. Freebase: a collaboratively created graph database for structuring human knowledge. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 2008.
[10]
A. Bonifati, W. Martens, and T. Timm. An analytical study of large SPARQL query logs. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 11(2), 2017.
[11]
A. Bordes, N. Usunier, S. Chopra, and J. Weston. Large-scale simple question answering with memory networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.02075, 2015.
[12]
E. Cabrio, P. Cimiano, V. Lopez, and S. Walter. QALD-3: Multilingual question answering over linked data. In CLEF Working Notes Papers, 2013.
[13]
E. Cabrio, J. Cojan, A. P. Aprosio, B. Magnini, A. Lavelli, and F. Gandon. QAKiS: an open domain QA system based on relational patterns. In Proceedings of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 2012.
[14]
E. Cabrio, J. Cojan, B. Magnini, F. Gandon, and A. Lavelli. Qakis@ QALD-2. 2012.
[15]
Q. Cai and A. Yates. Large-scale semantic parsing via schema matching and lexicon extension. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2013.
[16]
A. Carlson, J. Betteridge, B. Kisiel, B. Settles, E. R. Hruschka, and T. M. Mitchell. Toward an architecture for never-ending language learning. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, 2010.
[17]
J. D. Choi, J. Tetreault, and A. Stent. It depends: Dependency parser comparison using a web-based evaluation tool. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), 2015.
[18]
W. Cui, Y. Xiao, H. Wang, Y. Song, S.-w. Hwang, and W. Wang. KBQA: Learning question answering over QA corpora and knowledge bases. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 10(5), 2017.
[19]
D. Diefenbach, K. Singh, and P. Maret. WDAqua-core0: A question answering component for the research community. In Semantic Web Evaluation Challenge, 2017.
[20]
X. Dong and A. Halevy. Indexing dataspaces. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 2007.
[21]
M. Dubey, S. Dasgupta, A. Sharma, K. Höffner, and J. Lehmann. AskNow: A framework for natural language query formalization in sparql. In European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), 2016.
[22]
A. Fader, L. Zettlemoyer, and O. Etzioni. Open question answering over curated and extracted knowledge bases. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2014.
[23]
K. Höffner, S. Walter, E. Marx, R. Usbeck, J. Lehmann, and A.-C. Ngonga Ngomo. Survey on challenges of question answering in the semantic web. Semantic Web, 8(6), 2017.
[24]
M. Honnibal and M. Johnson. An improved non-monotonic transition system for dependency parsing. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2015.
[25]
S. Hu, L. Zou, J. X. Yu, H. Wang, and D. Zhao. Answering natural language questions by subgraph matching over knowledge graphs. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 30(5), 2017.
[26]
Z. Jia, A. Abujabal, R. Saha Roy, J. Strötgen, and G. Weikum. TempQuestions: A benchmark for temporal question answering. In Proceedings of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2018.
[27]
E. Kaufmann, A. Bernstein, and R. Zumstein. Querix: A natural language interface to query ontologies based on clarification dialogs. In Proceedings of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 2006.
[28]
S. Liang, K. Stockinger, T. M. de Farias, M. Anisimova, and M. Gil. Querying knowledge graphs in natural language. Journal of Big Data, 8(1), 2021.
[29]
V. Lopez, M. Fernández, E. Motta, and N. Stieler. PowerAqua: supporting users in querying and exploring the semantic web. Semantic Web, 3(3), 2012.
[30]
X. Ma and E. Hovy. End-to-end sequence labeling via bi-directional lstm-cnns-crf. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2016.
[31]
C. Matuszek, M. Witbrock, J. Cabral, and J. DeOliveira. An introduction to the syntax and content of cyc. UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department Collection, 2006.
[32]
T. Pellissier Tanon, D. Vrandečić, S. Schaffert, T. Steiner, and L. Pintscher. From Freebase to Wikidata: The great migration. In Proceedings of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2016.
[33]
K. Singh, A. Both, A. Sethupat, and S. Shekarpour. Frankenstein: a platform enabling reuse of question answering components. In European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), 2018.
[34]
K. Singh, A. S. Radhakrishna, A. Both, S. Shekarpour, I. Lytra, R. Usbeck, A. Vyas, A. Khikmatullaev, D. Punjani, C. Lange, et al. Why reinvent the wheel: Let's build question answering systems together. In Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2018.
[35]
Y. Su, H. Sun, B. Sadler, M. Srivatsa, I. Gur, Z. Yan, and X. Yan. On generating characteristic-rich question sets for qa evaluation. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2016.
[36]
F. M. Suchanek, G. Kasneci, and G. Weikum. Yago: a core of semantic knowledge. In Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2007.
[37]
T. P. Tanon, M. Dias de Assuncao, E. Caron, and F. Suchanek. Platypus - A Multilingual Question Answering Platform for Wikidata. Technical report, 2018.
[38]
P. Trivedi, G. Maheshwari, M. Dubey, and J. Lehmann. LC-QuAD: A corpus for complex question answering over knowledge graphs. In International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 2017.
[39]
C. Unger, L. Bühmann, J. Lehmann, A.-C. Ngonga Ngomo, D. Gerber, and P. Cimiano. Template-based question answering over RDF data. In Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2012.
[40]
C. Unger, P. Cimiano, V. Lopez, and E. Motta. Question answering over linked data (QALD-1). In Workshop on Question Answering Over Linked Data (QALD-1), 2011.
[41]
C. Unger, C. Forascu, V. Lopez, A.-C. N. Ngomo, E. Cabrio, P. Cimiano, and S. Walter. Question answering over linked data (QALD-4). In CLEF Working Notes Papers, 2014.
[42]
C. Unger, C. Forascu, V. Lopez, A.-C. N. Ngomo, E. Cabrio, P. Cimiano, and S. Walter. Question answering over linked data (QALD-5). In CLEF Working Notes Papers, 2015.
[43]
C. Unger, A.-C. N. Ngomo, and E. Cabrio. 6th open challenge on question answering over linked data (QALD-6). In Semantic Web Challenges, 2016.
[44]
R. Usbeck, R. H. Gusmita, M. Saleem, and A.-C. N. Ngomo. 9th challenge on question answering over linked data (QALD-9). Joint Workshop on Natural Language Interfaces for Web of Data (NLIWoD) and Question Answering over Linked Data challenge, 2018.
[45]
R. Usbeck, A.-C. N. Ngomo, F. Conrads, M. Röder, and G. Napolitano. 8th challenge on question answering over linked data (QALD-8). Joint Proceedings of the International Workshop on Benchmarking Linked Data and Natural Language Interfaces for the Web of Data (NLIWoD), 2018.
[46]
R. Usbeck, A.-C. N. Ngomo, B. Haarmann, A. Krithara, M. Röder, and G. Napolitano. 7th open challenge on question answering over linked data (QALD-7). In Semantic Web Challenges, 2017.
[47]
D. Vrandečić and M. Krötzsch. Wikidata: a free collaborative knowledgebase. Communications of the ACM, 57(10), 2014.
[48]
R. Weischedel. OntoNotes Release 5.0 LDC2013T19. Linguistic Data Consortium, 2013.
[49]
M. Yahya, K. Berberich, S. Elbassuoni, and G. Weikum. Robust question answering over the web of linked data. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2013.
[50]
G. Zenz, X. Zhou, E. Minack, W. Siberski, and W. Nejdl. From keywords to semantic queries-Incremental query construction on the semantic web. Journal of Web Semantics, 7(3), 2009.
[51]
W. Zheng, J. X. Yu, L. Zou, and H. Cheng. Question answering over knowledge graphs: question understanding via template decomposition. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2018.
[52]
Q. Zhou, C. Wang, M. Xiong, H. Wang, and Y. Yu. Spark: Adapting keyword query to semantic search. In Proceedings of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 2007.
[53]
L. Zou, R. Huang, H. Wang, J. X. Yu, W. He, and D. Zhao. Natural language question answering over RDF: a graph data driven approach. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 2014.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Ericsogate: Advancing Analytics and Management of Data from Diverse Sources within Ericsson Using Knowledge GraphsProceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3627673.3680033(4795-4802)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Maestro: Automatic Generation of Comprehensive Benchmarks for Question Answering Over Knowledge GraphsProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/35893221:2(1-24)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2023
  • (2023)StreamE: Learning to Update Representations for Temporal Knowledge Graphs in Streaming ScenariosProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3591772(622-631)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment  Volume 14, Issue 8
April 2021
200 pages
ISSN:2150-8097
Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

VLDB Endowment

Publication History

Published: 01 April 2021
Published in PVLDB Volume 14, Issue 8

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)12
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6
Reflects downloads up to 24 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Ericsogate: Advancing Analytics and Management of Data from Diverse Sources within Ericsson Using Knowledge GraphsProceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3627673.3680033(4795-4802)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Maestro: Automatic Generation of Comprehensive Benchmarks for Question Answering Over Knowledge GraphsProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/35893221:2(1-24)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2023
  • (2023)StreamE: Learning to Update Representations for Temporal Knowledge Graphs in Streaming ScenariosProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3591772(622-631)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
  • (2021)CBenchProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3476311.347632614:12(2711-2714)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2021

View Options

Login options

Full Access

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media