Organizations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) requires answer inference from evidence that is both structurally valid and temporally admissible. Existing methods often leave anchor-event binding, temporal admissibility, and ordinal selection implicit in model reasoning, task-specific training, or similarity-driven retrieval, allowing locally relevant but invalid facts to enter the answer context. We formulate complex TKGQA as evidence-space control and propose SCoP (Structured Constraint Parsing), a constraint-centric framework that externalizes temporal decisions before answer inference. Instead of treating retrieved facts as admissible evidence by default, SCoP separates answer-seeking event patterns from temporal anchor events, conservatively grounds them to canonical TKG entities and relations, and translates temporal intent into executable constraints with optional ranking requirements. These constraints operate over normalized point and interval ranges, enabling deterministic filtering of structurally compatible candidates and producing a compact evidence space for generation. Experiments on MultiTQ and TimelineCronQ-R assess SCoP across timestamped point-fact and interval-oriented settings with richer temporal relations and ordering dependencies. Without task-specific parameter updates, SCoP achieves 0.825 Hits@1 on MultiTQ and 0.761 Hits@1 on TimelineCronQ-R, with gains on constraint-intensive question types. These results support explicit evidence-space control over unconstrained retrieval or implicit temporal reasoning.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Two failure modes in TKGQA caused by implicit temporal constraints: model-internal decision errors and similarity-induced noisy evidence. Two-panel illustration using a temporal question about negotiations with Ali Jafari. The upper panel contrasts a constraint-aware reasoning path that identifies an anchor event, filters candidate events by the before relation, and selects the latest valid event with an unconstrained reasoning path that focuses on local entity relevance and returns an invalid result. The lower panel shows similarity-based top-k retrieval containing one valid candidate together with several candidates that occur after the anchor or fail the required ordering condition.
Figure 2. Overview of the SCoP framework. SCoP consists of one offline retrieval-store preparation stage, three query-time evidence-control stages, and a final answer inference stage: (I) Temporal Graph and Retrieval Store Preparation; (II) Event Triple Identification, which extracts anchor triples and an optional search triple; (III) Conservative Graph Alignment, which grounds extracted triples to canonical TKG elements; (IV) Constraint-guided Evidence Construction, which retrieves structurally compatible facts and filters them using parsed temporal constraints and ranking requirements; and (V) Answer Inference over the constrained evidence space. Pipeline diagram of SCoP with five stages. An offline temporal knowledge graph and retrieval store provide entities, relations, and timestamps. At query time, a sample question is decomposed into two anchor triples and one search triple, which are conservatively aligned to canonical graph entities and relations. Temporal constraints and a ranking requirement are then parsed and applied to structurally compatible candidate triples. The filtered and ranked evidence is finally supplied to the answer inference stage.
Field
Values
Meaning
α
event / explicit_time / explicit_interval
Type of temporal reference used to resolve the constraint.
ω
before / after / equal / inside / overlap
Temporal operator for comparing candidate and reference times.
η
anchor index / time text / interval pair
Concrete reference content used during constraint execution.
g
day / month / year / ∅
Granularity for equal .
δ
positive days / ∅
Day offset for relative time.
ρ
(asc,k) , (desc,k) , or ∅
Post-filter ordinal ranking.
Table 1. Structured temporal constraint and ranking schema.
Dataset
Knowledge Graph
Question-Answer
Fact
Ent.
Rel.
Time.
Train
Val
Test
MultiTQ
461,329
10,488
251
4,017
386,787
57,979
54,584
TCronQ-R
328,635
122,569
203
12,191
16,639
2,080
2,080
Table 2. Statistics of KGs and QA datasets. TCronQ-R denotes TimelineCronQ-R.
Method
Overall
Question Type
Answer Type
Single
Multiple
Entity
Time
TKG Embedding-based Methods
EmbedKGQA
0.206
0.235
0.134
0.290
0.001
CronKGQA
0.279
0.337
0.134
0.328
0.156
MultiQA
0.293
0.347
0.159
0.349
0.157
Fine-tuning-based LLM Methods
Table 3. Performance comparison on the MultiTQ dataset. Results are reported as Hits@1. The best results are highlighted in bold, and the second-best results are underlined.
Method
Overall
Question Level
Simple
Medium
Complex
Static Single-turn Retrieval
RAG
0.515
0.840
0.498
0.209
RAG +Filter
0.575
0.840
0.584
0.300
Query Transformation Enhancement
HyDE
0.494
0.801
0.485
0.197
Table 4. Performance comparison on TimelineCronQ-R. Results are reported as Hits@1. Baseline methods are evaluated both in their standard form and with a post-retrieval filter ( +Filter ) to analyze the impact of noise reduction. The best results are highlighted in bold, and the second-best results are underlined.
Table 6. Candidate-space control across question types on MultiTQ and TimelineCronQ-R.
Figure 3. Effect of different backbone models on the overall Hits@1 performance of SCoP. Horizontal bar chart comparing SCoP with four backbone models on MultiTQ and TimelineCronQ-R. All three alternative backbones improve over Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct in overall Hits@1. Gemini-3-Flash achieves the highest result on MultiTQ, while GPT-3.5-Turbo and Gemini-3-Flash achieve the highest overall results on TimelineCronQ-R.
Level
Gold Event
Gold Answer
Any Ret.
Full Ret.
Any Ret.
Full Ret.
Simple
84.3%
84.0%
87.1%
86.6%
Medium
90.2%
84.4%
89.6%
82.2%
Complex
82.6%
76.4%
74.7%
72.4%
Overall
85.7%
81.6%
84.9%
81.3%
Table 7. Gold-event and gold-answer retention in the final evidence space on TimelineCronQ-R .
Model Variant
MultiTQ
TimelineCronQ-R
Hits@1
Δ
Hits@1
Δ
Full
0.825
–
0.761
–
w/o triple
0.517
-37.3%
0.420
-44.8%
w/o alignment
0.463
-43.9%
0.721
-5.3%
w/o constraint
0.449
-45.6%
0.541
-28.9%
Table 8. Ablation study of SCoP under the Overall Hits@1 metric. Δ denotes the relative performance change compared with the full model.
Knowledge graph question generation (KGQG) aims to generate natural-language questions from structured graph evidence. Existing KGQG benchmarks, however, are mostly built on static knowledge graphs and do not encode the temporal scopes of graph facts. As a result, they cannot evaluate whether generated questions faithfully preserve temporal validity, event ordering, and answer-determining temporal constraints. In this paper, we study temporal knowledge graph question generation (TKGQG), where a generated question must be faithful to both the support subgraph and the temporal constraints required to identify the target answer. We propose ChronoQG, the first temporally expressive and hop-bounded benchmark construction framework for TKGQG. ChronoQG integrates a comprehensive temporal-constraint taxonomy, topology-temporal subgraph sampling, and trace-grounded question generation to construct temporally faithful questions. The framework produces four benchmark datasets from heterogeneous temporal knowledge graphs, totaling 16,011 verified questions. We evaluate representative LLM-based KGQG methods and prompting baselines across diverse TKGQG settings, including temporal-constraint counts, topological templates, and temporal-constraint types. The results show that existing methods struggle to preserve temporal constraints, especially under multi-constraint settings and harder temporal-constraint types. These findings reveal a clear gap between static KGQG and TKGQG, and establish ChronoQG as a challenging testbed for temporally faithful question generation.
Xuemeng Liu, Zhengpin Li, Wanpeng Tang +2
Peking University Beijing, China · Shanghai University of Finance and Economics Shanghai, China
Question Answering over Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGQA) requires reasoning over time-sensitive facts, yet existing embedding-based methods struggle with multi-step queries due to single-pass reasoning pipelines. We propose SABET-QA, a framework that iteratively refines reasoning states across multiple hops via a bidirectional entity-temporal scoring mechanism and a slot-aware contextualization module that aligns question semantics with temporal KG embeddings. A differentiable working memory enables progressive hypothesis refinement, while auxiliary temporal boundaries serve as coarse supervision when available. Experiments on CronQuestions, Complex-CronQuestions, MultiTQ, and TimeQuestions demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, particularly on complex multi-step temporal queries.
Brahim Touayouch, Mirette Moawad, Dmitry Akulov
QuickSort Research, Paris, France · ENS Paris-Saclay, École Polytechnique, France
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.
Wuzhenghong Wen, Bowen Zhou, Jinwen Huang +5
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 +2