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Logical Queries

Logical queries are formal information requests expressed through mathematical logic, primarily first-order logic, used to retrieve target entities or subgraphs from structured data sources such as knowledge graphs. Unlike simple single-step lookups, these queries formulate complex, multi-hop reasoning tasks by chaining relational traversals together with standard logical operations, including conjunction, disjunction, negation, and existential quantification. Executing a logical query requires identifying the set of entities that satisfy all specified relational pathways and logical constraints, which can be accomplished either through exact symbolic graph traversal on complete structures or via predictive neural models designed to infer missing connections within incomplete knowledge bases.

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Neural-Symbolic Models for Logical Queries on Knowledge Graphs

Neural-Symbolic Models for Logical Queries on Knowledge Graphs

Zhaocheng Zhu, Mikhail Galkin, Zuobai Zhang, Jian Tang

OrganizationsCIFARHEC MontréalMcGill UniversityMila – Québec Artificial Intelligence InstituteUniversité de Montréal

Why you should read this

Presents a neural-symbolic framework that executes complex first-order logic queries over incomplete knowledge graphs by combining graph neural networks with product fuzzy logic, providing interpretable intermediate steps and state-of-the-art reasoning accuracy.

Answering complex first-order logic (FOL) queries on knowledge graphs is a fundamental task for multi-hop reasoning. Traditional symbolic methods traverse a complete knowledge graph to extract the answers, which provides good interpretation for each step. Recent neural methods learn geometric embeddings for complex queries. These methods can generalize to incomplete knowledge graphs, but their reasoning process is hard to interpret. In this paper, we propose Graph Neural Network Query Executor (GNN-QE), a neural-symbolic model that enjoys the advantages of both worlds. GNN-QE decomposes a complex FOL query into relation projections and logical operations over fuzzy sets, which provides interpretability for intermediate variables. To reason about the missing links, GNN-QE adapts a graph neural network from knowledge graph completion to execute the relation projections, and models the logical operations with product fuzzy logic. Experiments on 3 datasets show that GNN-QE significantly improves over previous state-of-the-art models in answering FOL queries. Meanwhile, GNN-QE can predict the number of answers without explicit supervision, and provide visualizations for intermediate variables.

Added

2026-09-26