CypherBench: Towards Precise Retrieval over Full-scale Modern Knowledge Graphs in the LLM Era

Yanlin Feng, Simone Papicchio, Sajjadur Rahman


Abstract
Retrieval from graph data is crucial for augmenting large language models (LLM) with both open-domain knowledge and private enterprise data, and it is also a key component in the recent GraphRAG system (CITATION). Despite decades of research on knowledge graphs and knowledge base question answering, leading LLM frameworks (Langchain and LlamaIndex) have only minimal support for retrieval from modern encyclopedic knowledge graphs like Wikidata. In this paper, we analyze the root cause and suggest that modern RDF knowledge graphs (Wikidata, Freebase) are less efficient for LLMs due to overly large schemas that far exceed the typical LLM context window, use of resource identifiers, overlapping and ambiguous relation types and lack of normalization. As a solution, we propose property graph views on top of the underlying RDF graph that can be efficiently queried by LLMs using Cypher. We instantiated this idea on Wikidata and introduced CypherBench, the first benchmark with 11 large-scale, multi-domain property graphs with 7.8 million entities and over 10,000 questions. To achieve this, we tackled several key challenges, including developing an RDF-to-property graph conversion engine, creating a systematic pipeline for text-to-Cypher task generation, and designing new evaluation metrics.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.438
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8934–8958
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.438/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yanlin Feng, Simone Papicchio, and Sajjadur Rahman. 2025. CypherBench: Towards Precise Retrieval over Full-scale Modern Knowledge Graphs in the LLM Era. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8934–8958, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CypherBench: Towards Precise Retrieval over Full-scale Modern Knowledge Graphs in the LLM Era (Feng et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.438.pdf