@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2025-rule,
title = "Rule-{KBQA}: Rule-Guided Reasoning for Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering with Large Language Models",
author = "Zhang, Zhiqiang and
Wen, Liqiang and
Zhao, Wen",
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.562/",
pages = "8399--8417",
abstract = "Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) is recognized as a challenging task, especially when parsing complex questions into executable logical forms. Traditional semantic parsing (SP)-based approaches exhibit inconsistent performance in handling various complex questions. As large language models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional reasoning ability and language comprehension, recent studies have employed LLMs for semantic parsing to directly generate logical forms that can be executed on knowledge bases (KBs) to achieve the desired results. However, these methods of relying exclusively on LLMs to ensure grammaticality, faithfulness, and controllability may diminish their effectiveness due to hallucinations in the reasoning process. In this paper, we introduce Rule-KBQA, a framework that employs learned rules to guide the generation of logical forms. The proposed method contains two phases, an induction phase and a deduction phase. In the induction phase, we initially extract rules from the existing data and then employ the Rule-Following Fine-Tuned (RFFT) LLM to generate additional rules, ultimately constructing a comprehensive rule library. In the deduction phase, a symbolic agent, guided by learned rules, explores the environment KB to incrementally construct executable logical forms. Meanwhile, we leverage the discriminative capability of LLMs to evaluate the plausibility of candidate decisions. Extensive experiments indicate that our method achieves competitive results on standard KBQA datasets, clearly demonstrating its effectiveness."
}
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<abstract>Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) is recognized as a challenging task, especially when parsing complex questions into executable logical forms. Traditional semantic parsing (SP)-based approaches exhibit inconsistent performance in handling various complex questions. As large language models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional reasoning ability and language comprehension, recent studies have employed LLMs for semantic parsing to directly generate logical forms that can be executed on knowledge bases (KBs) to achieve the desired results. However, these methods of relying exclusively on LLMs to ensure grammaticality, faithfulness, and controllability may diminish their effectiveness due to hallucinations in the reasoning process. In this paper, we introduce Rule-KBQA, a framework that employs learned rules to guide the generation of logical forms. The proposed method contains two phases, an induction phase and a deduction phase. In the induction phase, we initially extract rules from the existing data and then employ the Rule-Following Fine-Tuned (RFFT) LLM to generate additional rules, ultimately constructing a comprehensive rule library. In the deduction phase, a symbolic agent, guided by learned rules, explores the environment KB to incrementally construct executable logical forms. Meanwhile, we leverage the discriminative capability of LLMs to evaluate the plausibility of candidate decisions. Extensive experiments indicate that our method achieves competitive results on standard KBQA datasets, clearly demonstrating its effectiveness.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Rule-KBQA: Rule-Guided Reasoning for Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering with Large Language Models
%A Zhang, Zhiqiang
%A Wen, Liqiang
%A Zhao, Wen
%Y Rambow, Owen
%Y Wanner, Leo
%Y Apidianaki, Marianna
%Y Al-Khalifa, Hend
%Y Eugenio, Barbara Di
%Y Schockaert, Steven
%S Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
%D 2025
%8 January
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Abu Dhabi, UAE
%F zhang-etal-2025-rule
%X Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) is recognized as a challenging task, especially when parsing complex questions into executable logical forms. Traditional semantic parsing (SP)-based approaches exhibit inconsistent performance in handling various complex questions. As large language models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional reasoning ability and language comprehension, recent studies have employed LLMs for semantic parsing to directly generate logical forms that can be executed on knowledge bases (KBs) to achieve the desired results. However, these methods of relying exclusively on LLMs to ensure grammaticality, faithfulness, and controllability may diminish their effectiveness due to hallucinations in the reasoning process. In this paper, we introduce Rule-KBQA, a framework that employs learned rules to guide the generation of logical forms. The proposed method contains two phases, an induction phase and a deduction phase. In the induction phase, we initially extract rules from the existing data and then employ the Rule-Following Fine-Tuned (RFFT) LLM to generate additional rules, ultimately constructing a comprehensive rule library. In the deduction phase, a symbolic agent, guided by learned rules, explores the environment KB to incrementally construct executable logical forms. Meanwhile, we leverage the discriminative capability of LLMs to evaluate the plausibility of candidate decisions. Extensive experiments indicate that our method achieves competitive results on standard KBQA datasets, clearly demonstrating its effectiveness.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.562/
%P 8399-8417
Markdown (Informal)
[Rule-KBQA: Rule-Guided Reasoning for Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering with Large Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.562/) (Zhang et al., COLING 2025)
ACL