When Correct Edges Cannot Be Verified: A Provenance Gap in Incomplete KGQA and a Provenance-Favoring Completion Policy
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2606.15833 (cs)
[Submitted on 14 Jun 2026]
Title:When Correct Edges Cannot Be Verified: A Provenance Gap in Incomplete KGQA and a Provenance-Favoring Completion Policy
View a PDF of the paper titled When Correct Edges Cannot Be Verified: A Provenance Gap in Incomplete KGQA and a Provenance-Favoring Completion Policy, by Yongqi Kang and 2 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering (IKGQA) requires completing missing edges to continue reasoning. A growing line of work verifies completed edges against retrieved text, treating textual support as a proxy for edge quality. We ask a question that, to our knowledge, has not been systematically tested: does textual verifiability actually track correctness? Exploiting the gold deleted triples provided by the standard random-deletion protocol, we measure both. The finding is counterintuitive: among gold-correct completed edges, 76-96% have no supporting passage even under exhaustive retrieval, robustly across deletion rates (20%/40%), datasets (CWQ/WebQSP), and relation types (structural, commonsense, long-tail). Most Freebase-style facts simply do not occur as head-tail co-mentions in text. Textual faithfulness therefore measures provenance, not correctness -- separated by a paradigm-level gap no in-corpus retrieval closes. This reframes edge completion. Since most completed edges -- correct or not -- are causally redundant for the answer (95-97% of correct answers do not depend on any unsupported edge), the central question shifts from "is the edge correct?" to "admit or abstain under provenance uncertainty?" Within this framing we present TGComplete, a provenance-favoring admission policy that retrieves evidence at a reasoning breakpoint, verifies a candidate through a lightweight loop, and abstains when support is absent. Against the generate-to-complete baseline GoG, it attains higher edge precision against gold (15-21% vs 3-14%), with no statistically detectable EM loss and 3.1-7.4 times higher strict faithfulness of admitted edges -- at the cost of lower recall. We position TGComplete not as uniformly better, but as a principled point on a precision/provenance-recall trade-off, appropriate when auditability matters.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.15833 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2606.15833v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.15833
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
View a PDF of the paper titled When Correct Edges Cannot Be Verified: A Provenance Gap in Incomplete KGQA and a Provenance-Favoring Completion Policy, by Yongqi Kang and 2 other authors
References & Citations
Loading...
Bookmark
Bibliographic Tools
Code, Data, Media
Demos
Related Papers
About arXivLabs
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language
-
Generating in the Limit with Infinitely Many Hallucinations
Jun 30
-
Extracting Knowledge from an Arabic-English Machine-Readable Dictionary Using Information Extraction
Jun 30
-
Developmental Trajectories of Situation Modeling and Mentalizing in Transformer Language Models
Jun 30
-
A French OSCE Dialogue Dataset and Controllable Virtual Patient System for Clinical Training
Jun 30
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.