MQA-KEAL: Multi-hop Question Answering under Knowledge Editing for Arabic Language

Muhammad Asif Ali, Nawal Daftardar, Mutayyba Waheed, Jianbin Qin, Di Wang


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities across numerous application domains. A key challenge is to keep these models updated with latest available information, which limits the true potential of these models for the end-applications. Although, there have been numerous attempts for LLMs’ Knowledge Editing (KE), i.e., to update and/or edit the LLMs’ prior knowledge and in turn test it via Multi-hop Question Answering (MQA), yet so far these studies are primarily focused and/or developed for English language. To bridge this gap, in this paper we propose: Multi-hop Questioning Answering under Knowledge Editing for Arabic Language (MQA-KEAL). MQA-KEAL stores knowledge edits as structured knowledge units in the external memory. In order to solve multi-hop question, it first uses task-decomposition to decompose the question into smaller sub-problems. Later for each sub-problem, it iteratively queries the external memory and/or target LLM in order to generate the final response. In addition, we also contribute MQUAKE-AR (Arabic translation of English benchmark MQUAKE), as well as a new benchmark MQA-AEVAL for rigorous performance evaluation of MQA under KE for Arabic language. Experimentation evaluation reveals MQA-KEAL outperforms the baseline models by a significant margin. We release the codes for MQA-KEAL at https: //github.com/asif6827/MQA-Keal.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.377
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5629–5644
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.377/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Muhammad Asif Ali, Nawal Daftardar, Mutayyba Waheed, Jianbin Qin, and Di Wang. 2025. MQA-KEAL: Multi-hop Question Answering under Knowledge Editing for Arabic Language. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 5629–5644, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MQA-KEAL: Multi-hop Question Answering under Knowledge Editing for Arabic Language (Ali et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.377.pdf