HySQA: Hybrid Scholarly Question Answering

Authors: Tilahun Abedissa Taffa, Debayan Banerjee, Yaregal Assabie, Ricardo Usbeck

Year: 2025

Conference: SEMANTiCS 2025

Abstract: Purpose: The heterogeneity of scholarly information in knowledge graphs (KGs) and unstructured textual sources poses challenges in building robust Scholarly Question Answering (SQA) systems. Existing datasets and models typically address a narrow spectrum, focusing exclusively on KGs or unstructured sources and limiting evaluation to simple factoid questions. This gap leaves current systems unable to answer complex, hybrid scholarly questions that require integrating evidence from multiple heterogeneous data sources. Methodology: We introduce HySQA (Hybrid Scholarly Question Answering), a large-scale benchmarking dataset containing hybrid questions over scholarly KGs and Wikipedia text. HySQA contains complex questions that need to traverse facts across structured and unstructured sources. We also develop a baseline model that adaptively decomposes each question into sub-questions, identifies their answer sources, retrieves relevant information from SKGs and Wikipedia, and generates an answer using a hybrid augmented answer generation framework. Findings: The experimental results show that integrating static and adaptive decomposition methods is more effective than static decomposition alone. Value: Introducing HySQA provides the community with resources for evaluating the advancements in scholarly QA research.

Show BibTeX
@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/i-semantics/TaffaBAU25,
  author       = {Tilahun Abedissa Taffa and
                  Debayan Banerjee and
                  Yaregal Assabie and
                  Ricardo Usbeck},
  editor       = {Blerina Spahiu and
                  Sahar Vahdati and
                  Angelo A. Salatino and
                  Tassilo Pellegrini and
                  Giray Havur},
  title        = {HySQA: Hybrid Scholarly Question Answering},
  booktitle    = {Linking Meaning: Semantic Technologies Shaping the Future of {AI}
                  - Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Semantic Systems,
                  SEMANTiCS 2025, Vienna, Austria, September 3-5, 2025},
  series       = {Studies on the Semantic Web},
  volume       = {62},
  pages        = {247--263},
  publisher    = {{IOS} Press},
  year         = {2025},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.3233/SSW250024},
  doi          = {10.3233/SSW250024},
  timestamp    = {Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:38:29 +0100},
  biburl       = {https://dblp.org/rec/conf/i-semantics/TaffaBAU25.bib},
  bibsource    = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org}
}