GROUNDEDKG-RAG: Grounded Knowledge Graph Index for Long-document Question Answering
Organizations: getAbstract · Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts Switzerland
Abstract
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have been widely adopted in contemporary large language models (LLMs) due to their ability to improve generation quality while reducing the required input context length. In this work, we focus on RAG systems for long-document question answering. Current approaches suffer from a heavy reliance on LLM descriptions resulting in high resource consumption and latency, repetitive content across hierarchical levels, and hallucinations due to no or limited grounding in the source text. To improve both efficiency and factual accuracy through grounding, we propose GroundedKG-RAG, a RAG system in which the knowledge graph is explicitly extracted from and grounded in the source document. Specifically, we define nodes in GroundedKG as entities and actions, and edges as temporal or semantic relations, with each node and edge grounded in the original sentences. We construct GroundedKG from semantic role labeling (SRL) and abstract meaning representation (AMR) parses and then embed it for retrieval. During querying, we apply the same transformation to the query and retrieve the most relevant sentences from the grounded source text for question answering. We evaluate GroundedKG-RAG on examples from the NarrativeQA dataset and find that it performs on par with a state-of-the art proprietary long-context model at smaller cost and outperforms a competitive baseline. Additionally, our GroundedKG is interpretable and readable by humans, facilitating auditing of results and error analysis.
Figures & tables
| Model | Exact match | Sequence match | Bertscore | RougeL F1 |
| Peter Rabbit: 300 nodes, 700 edges | ||||
| No context | 16 | 16 | 49 | 22 |
| Full context | 13 | 16 | 59 | 32 |
| GraphRAG | 16 | 20 | 63 | 8 |
| GroundedKG-RAG | 16 | 23 | 62 | 34 |
| The Phantom of the Opera: 25k nodes, 56k edges | ||||
| Model | Exact match | Sequence match | Bertscore | RougeL F1 |
| No context | 16 | 16 | 49 | 22 |
| Full context | 13 | 16 | 59 | 32 |
| GroundedKG-RAG with SRL and | 10 | 16 | 52 | 30 |
| GroundedKG-RAG with SRL, | ||||
| , and VectorSim ( ) | 10 | 13 | 51 | 25 |
| GroundedKG-RAG | 16 | 23 | 62 | 34 |
| Input Text: Peter’s mother put Peter to bed and made some camomile tea; and Peter’s mother gave a dose of some camomile tea to Peter! | |
| AMR Graph: | SRL Graph: |
| (a / and :op1 (p / put-01 :ARG0 (p2 / person :ARG0-of (h / have-rel-role-91 :ARG1 (p3 / person :name (n / name :op1 "Peter")) :ARG2 (m / mother))) :ARG1 p3 :ARG2 (b / bed)) :op2 (m2 / make-01 :ARG0 p2 :ARG1 (t / tea :mod (c / camomile) :quant (s / some))) :op3 (d / dose-01 :ARG0 p2 :ARG1 p3 :ARG2 t)) | Predicate: put ARG-0: Peter’s mother ARG-1: Peter ARG-2: to bed Predicate: made ARG-0: Peter’s mother ARG-1: some camomile tea Predicate: gave ARG-0: Peter’s mother ARG-1: a dose of some camomile tea ARG-2: to Peter |
| GroundedKG with AMR: | GroundedKG with SRL: |
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Model | Exact match | Sequence match | Bertscore | RougeL F1 |
| Robinson Crusoe | ||||
| No context | 13 | 13 | 25 | 8 |
| Full context | 36 | 36 | 55 | 31 |
| GroundedKG-RAG | 40 | 43 | 46 | 30 |
| GroundedKG-RAG with RetCount | 30 | 30 | 43 | 23 |
| Tyep I Error | |
| Question | What happened to the young rabbits’ father? |
| Matched Node | to the young rabbits’ father [’with four little rabbits mother’, ’The Tale Of Peter Rabbit’, ’from Peter cousin, little Benjamin Bunny’] happen [’happen_112’, ’come_100’, ’come_113’] |
| Grounded Text | text_0-3, text_0-6, text_0-20, text_0-21, text_0-27, text_0-37, text_0-40, text_0-42 |
| Predicted Answer | The text does not mention the father of the young rabbits. |
| Gold Answer | Mrs. McGregor baked him into a pie. |
| Solution | Improve GroundedKG construction for node matching |
Question Answering
Question answering studies how AI systems interpret questions and produce accurate, evidence-grounded answers across text, dialogue, and multimodal data.
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