DIVKNOWQA: Assessing the Reasoning Ability of LLMs via Open-Domain
  Question Answering over Knowledge Base and Text
Wenting Zhao Ye Liu Tong Niu Yao Wan Philip S. Yu Shafiq Joty Yingbo Zhou Semih Yavuz
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive generation
capabilities, but they suffer from hallucinations when solely relying on their
internal knowledge, especially when answering questions that require less
commonly known information. Retrieval-augmented LLMs have emerged as a
potential solution to ground LLMs in external knowledge. Nonetheless, recent
approaches have primarily emphasized retrieval from unstructured text corpora,
owing to its seamless integration into prompts. When using structured data such
as knowledge graphs, most methods simplify it into natural text, neglecting the
underlying structures. Moreover, a significant gap in the current landscape is
the absence of a realistic benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of
grounding LLMs on heterogeneous knowledge sources (e.g., knowledge base and
text). To fill this gap, we have curated a comprehensive dataset that poses two
unique challenges: (1) Two-hop multi-source questions that require retrieving
information from both open-domain structured and unstructured knowledge
sources; retrieving information from structured knowledge sources is a critical
component in correctly answering the questions. (2) The generation of symbolic
queries (e.g., SPARQL for Wikidata) is a key requirement, which adds another
layer of challenge. Our dataset is created using a combination of automatic
generation through predefined reasoning chains and human annotation. We also
introduce a novel approach that leverages multiple retrieval tools, including
text passage retrieval and symbolic language-assisted retrieval. Our model
outperforms previous approaches by a significant margin, demonstrating its
effectiveness in addressing the above-mentioned reasoning challenges.