Constrained Entity Selection under Partial Knowledge for LLM-Based Knowledge Graph QA

Abstract

Large language models are increasingly used for knowledge graph question answering (KGQA), but can fail to correctly ground answers in the underlying graph. Current approaches to LLM-based KGQA either rely on full semantic parsing into executable queries such as SPARQL, which is brittle in practice due to complex schemas or incompleteness of real-world KGs, or on LLM-reasoning and answer generation over KGs, which can be more robust but lacks formal guarantees. In this work, we study a complementary setting in which \emph{candidate} answers are generated by an LLM-based system and subsequently verified using lightweight symbolic constraints derived from the question. We introduce \emph{Constrained Entity Selection under Partial Knowledge (CES-PK)}, a problem formulation that focuses on eliminating invalid answers and providing symbolic support for valid ones without requiring construction of executable logical forms. To account for incomplete KGs, we employ a three-valued constraint semantics (\emph{satisfied, violated, unknown}) that avoids incorrect rejections under open-world assumptions. To demonstrate the effects of our method, we instantiate this framework over the Hetionet biomedical knowledge graph and evaluate the impact of type, relation, and exclusion constraints. Experiments show that precision improves by filtering invalid candidates, while recall is preserved due to retaining candidates whose constraints are not explicitly violated. Satisfied constraints provide additional positive symbolic evidence to rank remaining candidates.