# A Survey on Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base: Recent Advances and Challenges

Source: [A Survey on Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base: Recent Advances and Challenges](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa68061e209131cea1991b>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:27:00.192Z

Authors: Bin Fu, Yunqi Qiu, Chengguang Tang, Yang Li, Haiyang Yu, Jian Sun

Published: 2020-07-26T07:13:32.000Z

## Abstract

Question Answering (QA) over Knowledge Base (KB) aims to automatically answer natural language questions via well-structured relation information between entities stored in knowledge bases. In order to make KBQA more applicable in actual scenarios, researchers have shifted their attention from simple questions to complex questions, which require more KB triples and constraint inference. In this paper, we introduce the recent advances in complex QA. Besides traditional methods relying on templates and rules, the research is categorized into a taxonomy that contains two main branches, namely Information Retrieval-based and Neural Semantic Parsing-based. After describing the methods of these branches, we analyze directions for future research and introduce the models proposed by the Alime team.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.13069>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.13069.pdf>)