Reasoning with RAGged events: RAG-Enhanced Event Knowledge Base Construction and reasoning with proof-assistants

Abstract

Extracting structured computational representations of historical events from narrative text remains computationally expensive when constructed manually. While RDF/OWL reasoners enable graph-based reasoning, they are limited to fragments of first-order logic, preventing deeper temporal and semantic analysis. This paper addresses both challenges by developing automatic historical event extraction models using multiple LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, Llama 3.2) with three enhancement strategies: pure base generation, knowledge graph enhancement, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). We conducted comprehensive evaluations using historical texts from Thucydides. Our findings reveal that enhancement strategies optimize different performance dimensions rather than providing universal improvements. For coverage and historical breadth, base generation achieves optimal performance with Claude and GPT-4 extracting comprehensive events. However, for precision, RAG enhancement improves coordinate accuracy and metadata completeness. Model architecture fundamentally determines enhancement sensitivity: larger models demonstrate robust baseline performance with incremental RAG improvements, while Llama 3.2 shows extreme variance from competitive performance to complete failure. We then developed an automated translation pipeline converting extracted RDF representations into Coq proof assistant specifications, enabling higher-order reasoning beyond RDF capabilities including multi-step causal verification, temporal arithmetic with BC dates, and formal proofs about historical causation. The Coq formalization validates that RAG-discovered event types represent legitimate domain-specific semantic structures rather than ontological violations.