Ontology-Guided Evidence Path Inference for Multi-hop Knowledge Graph Question Answering

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28076v1
• Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:40:51 GMT
• Title: Ontology-Guided Evidence Path Inference for Multi-hop Knowledge Graph Question Answering
• Abstract summary: Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) aims to answer natural-language questions by reasoning over structured facts.<n>Existing multi-hop KGQA methods mainly rely on topic-centered expansion, which faces two key challenges.<n>We propose OPI, an ontology-guided evidence path inference framework for multi-hop KGQA.
• Score: 5.690260503175008
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) aims to answer natural-language questions by reasoning over structured facts. Existing multi-hop KGQA methods mainly rely on topic-centered expansion, which faces two key challenges: the search space rapidly grows with noisy mixed-type paths, and retrieved paths may fail to satisfy the semantic constraints of complex questions. To address these challenges, we propose OPI, an ontology-guided evidence path inference framework for multi-hop KGQA. OPI introduces a relation-centric ontology graph to capture the head-tail type constraints of relations, providing a compact interface for answer-side constraints. Based on this ontology graph, OPI first introduces a bidirectional retrieval mechanism by mapping the predicted answer type to compatible final-hop relations and combining topic-side prefix expansion with answer-side final-hop matching, thereby suppressing noisy mixed-type expansion. OPI further adopts an iterative refinement strategy to reassess retrieved paths and candidate answers under the question context, filtering type-compatible but question-irrelevant evidence for more reliable answer prediction. Experiments on WebQSP, CWQ, and MetaQA show that OPI substantially reduces the search space, improves Hit@1/F1 by 4.6/5.0 points on WebQSP and 8.9/3.3 points on CWQ over the strongest prior results, and achieves near-saturated Hit@1 on MetaQA with the retrieval module alone.

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