{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,30]],"date-time":"2026-09-30T05:56:30Z","timestamp":1790747790250,"version":"4.1.0"},"reference-count":54,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"11","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Proc. VLDB Endow."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2018,7]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>The gap between unstructured natural language and structured data makes it challenging to build a system that supports using natural language to query large knowledge graphs. Many existing methods construct a structured query for the input question based on a syntactic parser. Once the input question is parsed incorrectly, a false structured query will be generated, which may result in false or incomplete answers. The problem gets worse especially for complex questions. In this paper, we propose a novel systematic method to understand natural language questions by using a large number of binary templates rather than semantic parsers. As sufficient templates are critical in the procedure, we present a low-cost approach that can build a huge number of templates automatically. To reduce the search space, we carefully devise an index to facilitate the online template decomposition. Moreover, we design effective strategies to perform the two-level disambiguations (i.e., entity-level ambiguity and structure-level ambiguity) by considering the query semantics. Extensive experiments over several benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed approach is effective as it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both precision and recall.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.14778\/3236187.3236192","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2018,9,10]],"date-time":"2018-09-10T08:12:28Z","timestamp":1536567148000},"page":"1373-1386","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":96,"title":["Question answering over knowledge graphs"],"prefix":"10.14778","volume":"11","author":[{"given":"Weiguo","family":"Zheng","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jeffrey Xu","family":"Yu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Lei","family":"Zou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Peking University, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Hong","family":"Cheng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,7]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3038912.3052583"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.5555\/1182635.1164206"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_3_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2806416.2806472"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_4_1","first-page":"1","volume-title":"Working Notes of CLEF 2015 -Conference and Labs of the Evaluation forum","author":"Beaumont R.","year":"2015"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_5_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1533","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/D13-1160","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing","author":"Berant J.","year":"2013"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_6_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.3115\/v1\/P14-1133"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_7_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1376616.1376746"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_8_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.3115\/v1\/D14-1067"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_9_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.3115\/v1\/D14-1082"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_10_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P16-1061"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_11_1","first-page":"708","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning","author":"Cucerzan S.","year":"2007"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_12_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.14778\/3055540.3055549"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_13_1","first-page":"4240","volume-title":"IJCAI","author":"Cui W.","year":"2016"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_14_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2506182.2506198"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_15_1","first-page":"449","volume-title":"LREC","author":"de Marneffe M.-C.","year":"2006"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_16_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.5555\/1629808.1629811"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_17_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.14778\/2856318.2856330"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_18_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.2307\/1932409"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_19_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/s10115-017-1100-y"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_20_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/D17-1091"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_21_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"L. 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