Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) aims to answer natural language questions using knowledge graphs.Recent research leverages large language models (LLMs) to enhance KGQA reasoning, but faces limitations: retrieval-based methods are constrained by the quality of retrieved information, while agent-based methods rely heavily on proprietary LLMs.To address these limitations, we propose Retrieval-Judgment-Exploration (RJE), a framework that retrieves refined reasoning paths, evaluates their sufficiency, and conditionally explores additional evidence. Moreover, RJE introduces specialized auxiliary modules enabling small-sized LLMs to perform effectively: Reasoning Path Ranking, Question Decomposition, and Retriever-assisted Exploration. Experiments show that our approach with proprietary LLMs (such as GPT-4o-mini) outperforms existing baselines while enabling small open-source LLMs (such as 3B and 8B parameters) to achieve competitive results without fine-tuning LLMs.Additionally, RJE substantially reduces the number of LLM calls and token usage compared to agent-based methods, yielding significant efficiency improvements.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are widely used in NLP but struggle with capturing entity knowledge. To address this, knowledge enhancement techniques have been proposed. However, existing methods rely heavily on external knowledge bases embedding and often introduce noisy entity representations. In this work, we propose a novel **K**nowledge **E**nhancement **F**iltering **F**ramework named KEFF, which contains both knowledge enhancement and knowledge enhancement filtering modules for PLM. We find that there are certain redundant bits in the embedding space of PLMs. Building on this insight, we implement knowledge-enhanced mapping of redundant bit values in entity span tokens. In order to solve the knowledge enhancement problem of existing methods that introduce noisy entity representation knowledge, we further propose a novel knowledge enhancement filter based on our knowledge enhancement method. Finally, experiments on four knowledge-driven NLP tasks show that our method effectively improves the ability of PLMs on downstream tasks. Compared to state-of-the-art approachs, our method achieves the highest F1-score and accuracy, while reducing the computational cost by 1.7-2.5x.

Contextualized language modeling using deep Transformer networks has been applied to a variety of natural language processing tasks with remarkable success. However, we find that these models are not a panacea for a question-answering dialogue agent corpus task, which has hundreds of classes in a long-tailed frequency distribution, with only thousands of data points. Instead, we find substantial improvements in recall and accuracy on rare classes from a simple one-layer RNN with multi-headed self-attention and static word embeddings as inputs. While much research has used attention weights to illustrate what input is important for a task, the complexities of our dialogue corpus offer a unique opportunity to examine how the model represents what it attends to, and we offer a detailed analysis of how that contributes to improved performance on rare classes. A particularly interesting phenomenon we observe is that the model picks up implicit meanings by splitting different aspects of the semantics of a single word across multiple attention heads.