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negation queries

Negation queries are structured logic or database queries that incorporate the logical negation operator to identify and retrieve entities that do not satisfy specific relations, attributes, or constraints. In knowledge graph reasoning and first-order logic frameworks, a negation query operates as a complement function over candidate answer sets, selecting elements that lack defined edges or relational pathways. Evaluating negation queries requires managing knowledge graph completeness, as reasoning systems must distinguish between genuinely non-existent relationships and unobserved data under open-world or closed-world assumptions. Alongside operations such as conjunction and disjunction, negation queries enable multi-hop reasoning algorithms to express and process complex logic across interconnected data structures.

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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