Question Answering Over Spatio-Temporal Knowledge Graph

Xinbang Dai; Huiying Li; Nan Hu; Yongrui Chen; Rihui Jin; Huikang Hu; Guilin Qi

Paper

Question Answering Over Spatio-Temporal Knowledge Graph

Abstract

Spatio-temporal knowledge graphs (STKGs) enhance traditional KGs by integrating temporal and spatial annotations, enabling precise reasoning over questions with spatio-temporal dependencies. Despite their potential, research on spatio-temporal knowledge graph question answering (STKGQA) remains limited. This is primarily due to the lack of datasets that simultaneously contain spatio-temporal information, as well as methods capable of handling implicit spatio-temporal reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce the spatio-temporal question answering dataset (STQAD), the first comprehensive benchmark comprising 10,000 natural language questions that require both temporal and spatial reasoning. STQAD is constructed with real-world facts containing spatio-temporal information, ensuring that the dataset reflects practical scenarios. Furthermore, our experiments reveal that existing KGQA methods underperform on STQAD, primarily due to their inability to model spatio-temporal interactions. To address this, we propose the spatio-temporal complex question answering (STCQA) method, which jointly embeds temporal and spatial features into KG representations and dynamically filters answers through constraint-aware reasoning. STCQA achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing baselines. Our work not only provides a valuable resource for future research but also advances the field by offering a robust baseline for answering complex spatio-temporal questions.