Temporal-Aware Heterogeneous Graph Reasoning with Multi-View Fusion for Temporal Question Answering
Authors: Wuzhenghong Wen, Bowen Zhou, Jinwen Huang, Xianjie Wu, Yuwei Sun, Su Pan, Liang Li, Jianting Liu
Organizations: School of Internet of Things, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Faculty of Medicine & Health, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia · Beijing Information Science and Technology University · Dept. of Biomedical Engineering & Biotechnology, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi · Shortest Path Technology Co., Ltd.
Question Answering over Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGQA) has attracted growing interest for handling time-sensitive queries. However, existing methods still struggle with: 1) weak incorporation of temporal constraints in question representation, causing biased reasoning; 2) limited ability to perform explicit multi-hop reasoning; and 3) suboptimal fusion of language and graph representations. We propose a novel framework with temporal-aware question encoding, multi-hop graph reasoning, and multi-view heterogeneous information fusion. Specifically, our approach introduces: 1) a constraint-aware question representation that combines semantic cues from language models with temporal entity dynamics; 2) a temporal-aware graph neural network for explicit multi-hop reasoning via time-aware message passing; and 3) a multi-view attention mechanism for more effective fusion of question context and temporal graph knowledge. Experiments on multiple TKGQA benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over multiple baselines.
Figures & tables
Model
Hits@1
Hits@10
Overall
Question Type
Answer Type
Overall
Question Type
Answer Type
Complex
Simple
Entity
Time
Complex
Simple
Entity
Time
BERT
0.071
0.086
0.052
0.077
0.06
0.213
0.205
0.225
0.192
0.253
RoBERTa
0.07
0.086
0.05
0.082
0.048
0.202
0.192
0.215
0.186
0.231
KnowBERT
0.07
0.083
0.051
0.081
0.048
0.201
0.189
0.217
0.185
0.23
T5-3B
0.081
0.073
0.091
0.088
0.067
-
-
-
-
-
Table 1: Performance of baselines and our methods on the CronQuestions dataset.
Model
Overall
Explicit
Implicit
Temporal
Ordinal
CronKGQA
0.393
0.388
0.380
0.436
0.332
TMA
0.435
0.442
0.419
0.476
0.352
TempoQR
0.459
0.503
0.442
0.458
0.367
CTRN
0.466
0.469
0.446
0.512
0.382
Ours
0.539
0.534
0.510
0.617
0.412
Table 2: Hits@1 for different models on TimeQuestions.
Model
Hits@1
Overall
Question Type
Answer Type
Complex
Simple
Entity
Time
Ours
0.969
0.962
0.997
0.972
0.974
w/o time-aware
0.904
0.868
0.960
0.875
0.963
w/o adaptive
0.890
0.845
0.945
0.853
0.951
w/o multi-hop
0.886
0.813
0.984
0.880
0.902
Table 3: Results of component ablation experiment.
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China