Knowledge-based question answering using graph neural networks and contextual language representations

Abstract This work introduces a novel question answering (QA) framework that integrates commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet with deep contextual embeddings from BERT using a graph neural network for structured reasoning. For each question–answer pair, the system constructs a relevant subgraph from ConceptNet, which is then processed using Graph Attention Network v2 (GATv2) to capture semantic relationships among concepts. In parallel, BERT encodes the question–answer pair to provide contextual language representations. These two representations are fused into a joint embedding that combines structured knowledge with unstructured text understanding, enabling richer inference. Evaluations on the CommonsenseQA and OpenBookQA datasets show accuracy improvements of 82.3% and 86.21%, respectively, surpassing existing leading methods. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining knowledge graphs with language models for complex QA tasks requiring commonsense reasoning.