@inproceedings{liu-etal-2026-temporal,
    title = "Temporal Evidence Chain for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering with Large Language Models",
    author = "Liu, Shihao  and
      Zhou, Xiaofei  and
      Wang, Bo  and
      Zhang, Geyuan",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1361/",
    pages = "29515--29529",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) aims to answer temporal questions using knowledge from Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs).Existing LLM-based TKGQA methods typically utilize RAG-based or Agent-based paradigms, yet both struggle to construct reliable temporal evidence chains. RAG-based approaches primarily rely on semantic retrieval to fetch question-relevant contexts but overlook the structural dependencies within TKGs, leading to broken evidence chains, whereas iterative agents are prone to error propagation during multi-step reasoning.To address these limitations, we propose TECQA, a framework designed to construct temporal evidence chains for LLM reasoning. Firstly, TECQA employs structure-guided subgraph retrieval to capture structural dependencies and intermediate reasoning paths. Subsequently, it utilizes a k-nearest temporal neighbor pruning strategy to filter irrelevant noise while strictly preserving the continuous local history surrounding critical events. Finally, the retained temporal neighbors are serialized by temporal proximity to explicitly reconstruct a coherent temporal evidence chain. Extensive experiments on MultiTQ and CronQuestions demonstrate that TECQA achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines by 45.3{\%} particularly on complex queries. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/SimonsLiu/TECQA}."
}