Multi-hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graph~(KGQA) aims to find the answer entities that are multiple hops away from the topic entities mentioned in a natural language question on a large-scale Knowledge Graph (KG). To cope with the vast search space, existing work usually adopts a two-stage approach: it firstly retrieves a relatively small subgraph related to the question and then performs the reasoning on the subgraph to accurately find the answer entities. Although these two stages are highly related, previous work employs very different technical solutions for developing the retrieval and reasoning models, neglecting their relatedness in task essence. In this paper, we propose UniKGQA, a novel approach for multi-hop KGQA task, by unifying retrieval and reasoning in both model architecture and parameter learning. For model architecture, UniKGQA consists of a semantic matching module based on a pre-trained language model~(PLM) for question-relation semantic matching, and a matching information propagation module to propagate the matching information along the edges on KGs. For parameter learning, we design a shared pre-training task based on question-relation matching for both retrieval and reasoning models, and then propose retrieval- and reasoning-oriented fine-tuning strategies. Compared with previous studies, our approach is more unified, tightly relating the retrieval and reasoning stages. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method on the multi-hop KGQA task. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/UniKGQA.

UniKGQA是一种新的多跳知识图谱问答方法，通过统一检索和推理模型架构和参数学习，基于预训练语言模型的语义匹配模块和匹配信息传播模块进行问题与关系的语义匹配，采用共同的预训练任务和检索以及推理定向的微调策略。

UniKGQA：基于知识图谱的多跳问答统一检索与推理