simon razniewski
GPTKB v1.5: A Massive Knowledge Base for Exploring Factual LLM Knowledge
Hu, Yujia, Nguyen, Tuan-Phong, Ghosh, Shrestha, Müller, Moritz, Razniewski, Simon
Language models are powerful tools, yet their factual knowledge is still poorly understood, and inaccessible to ad-hoc browsing and scalable statistical analysis. This demonstration introduces GPTKB v1.5, a densely interlinked 100-million-triple knowledge base (KB) built for $14,000 from GPT-4.1, using the GPTKB methodology for massive-recursive LLM knowledge materialization (Hu et al., ACL 2025). The demonstration experience focuses on three use cases: (1) link-traversal-based LLM knowledge exploration, (2) SPARQL-based structured LLM knowledge querying, (3) comparative exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of LLM knowledge. Massive-recursive LLM knowledge materialization is a groundbreaking opportunity both for the research area of systematic analysis of LLM knowledge, as well as for automated KB construction. The GPTKB demonstrator is accessible at https://gptkb.org.
Completeness, Recall, and Negation in Open-World Knowledge Bases: A Survey
Razniewski, Simon, Arnaout, Hiba, Ghosh, Shrestha, Suchanek, Fabian
General-purpose knowledge bases (KBs) are a cornerstone of knowledge-centric AI. Many of them are constructed pragmatically from Web sources, and are thus far from complete. This poses challenges for the consumption as well as the curation of their content. While several surveys target the problem of completing incomplete KBs, the first problem is arguably to know whether and where the KB is incomplete in the first place, and to which degree. In this survey we discuss how knowledge about completeness, recall, and negation in KBs can be expressed, extracted, and inferred. We cover (i) the logical foundations of knowledge representation and querying under partial closed-world semantics; (ii) the estimation of this information via statistical patterns; (iii) the extraction of information about recall from KBs and text; (iv) the identification of interesting negative statements; and (v) relaxed notions of relative recall. This survey is targeted at two types of audiences: (1) practitioners who are interested in tracking KB quality, focusing extraction efforts, and building quality-aware downstream applications; and (2) data management, knowledge base and semantic web researchers who wish to understand the state of the art of knowledge bases beyond the open-world assumption. Consequently, our survey presents both fundamental methodologies and their working, and gives practice-oriented recommendations on how to choose between different approaches for a problem at hand.
Extracting Cultural Commonsense Knowledge at Scale
Nguyen, Tuan-Phong, Razniewski, Simon, Varde, Aparna, Weikum, Gerhard
Structured knowledge is important for many AI applications. Commonsense knowledge, which is crucial for robust human-centric AI, is covered by a small number of structured knowledge projects. However, they lack knowledge about human traits and behaviors conditioned on socio-cultural contexts, which is crucial for situative AI. This paper presents CANDLE, an end-to-end methodology for extracting high-quality cultural commonsense knowledge (CCSK) at scale. CANDLE extracts CCSK assertions from a huge web corpus and organizes them into coherent clusters, for 3 domains of subjects (geography, religion, occupation) and several cultural facets (food, drinks, clothing, traditions, rituals, behaviors). CANDLE includes judicious techniques for classification-based filtering and scoring of interestingness. Experimental evaluations show the superiority of the CANDLE CCSK collection over prior works, and an extrinsic use case demonstrates the benefits of CCSK for the GPT-3 language model. Code and data can be accessed at https://candle.mpi-inf.mpg.de/.
Class Cardinality Comparison as a Fermi Problem
Ghosh, Shrestha, Razniewski, Simon, Weikum, Gerhard
Questions on class cardinality comparisons are quite tricky to answer and come with its own challenges. They require some kind of reasoning since web documents and knowledge bases, indispensable sources of information, rarely store direct answers to questions, such as, ``Are there more astronauts or Physics Nobel Laureates?'' We tackle questions on class cardinality comparison by tapping into three sources for absolute cardinalities as well as the cardinalities of orthogonal subgroups of the classes. We propose novel techniques for aggregating signals with partial coverage for more reliable estimates and evaluate them on a dataset of 4005 class pairs, achieving an accuracy of 83.7%.
How Stable is Knowledge Base Knowledge?
Shrinivasan, Suhas, Razniewski, Simon
Knowledge Bases (KBs) provide structured representation of the real-world in the form of extensive collections of facts about real-world entities, their properties and relationships. They are ubiquitous in large-scale intelligent systems that exploit structured information such as in tasks like structured search, question answering and reasoning, and hence their data quality becomes paramount. The inevitability of change in the real-world, brings us to a central property of KBs -- they are highly dynamic in that the information they contain are constantly subject to change. In other words, KBs are unstable. In this paper, we investigate the notion of KB stability, specifically, the problem of KBs changing due to real-world change. Some entity-property-pairs do not undergo change in reality anymore (e.g., Einstein-children or Tesla-founders), while others might well change in the future (e.g., Tesla-board member or Ronaldo-occupation as of 2022). This notion of real-world grounded change is different from other changes that affect the data only, notably correction and delayed insertion, which have received attention in data cleaning, vandalism detection, and completeness estimation already. To analyze KB stability, we proceed in three steps. (1) We present heuristics to delineate changes due to world evolution from delayed completions and corrections, and use these to study the real-world evolution behaviour of diverse Wikidata domains, finding a high skew in terms of properties. (2) We evaluate heuristics to identify entities and properties likely to not change due to real-world change, and filter inherently stable entities and properties. (3) We evaluate the possibility of predicting stability post-hoc, specifically predicting change in a property of an entity, finding that this is possible with up to 83% F1 score, on a balanced binary stability prediction task.
Do Children Texts Hold The Key To Commonsense Knowledge?
Romero, Julien, Razniewski, Simon
Compiling comprehensive repositories of commonsense knowledge is a long-standing problem in AI. Many concerns revolve around the issue of reporting bias, i.e., that frequency in text sources is not a good proxy for relevance or truth. This paper explores whether children's texts hold the key to commonsense knowledge compilation, based on the hypothesis that such content makes fewer assumptions on the reader's knowledge, and therefore spells out commonsense more explicitly. An analysis with several corpora shows that children's texts indeed contain much more, and more typical commonsense assertions. Moreover, experiments show that this advantage can be leveraged in popular language-model-based commonsense knowledge extraction settings, where task-unspecific fine-tuning on small amounts of children texts (childBERT) already yields significant improvements. This provides a refreshing perspective different from the common trend of deriving progress from ever larger models and corpora.
UnCommonSense: Informative Negative Knowledge about Everyday Concepts
Arnaout, Hiba, Razniewski, Simon, Weikum, Gerhard, Pan, Jeff Z.
Commonsense knowledge about everyday concepts is an important asset for AI applications, such as question answering and chatbots. Recently, we have seen an increasing interest in the construction of structured commonsense knowledge bases (CSKBs). An important part of human commonsense is about properties that do not apply to concepts, yet existing CSKBs only store positive statements. Moreover, since CSKBs operate under the open-world assumption, absent statements are considered to have unknown truth rather than being invalid. This paper presents the UNCOMMONSENSE framework for materializing informative negative commonsense statements. Given a target concept, comparable concepts are identified in the CSKB, for which a local closed-world assumption is postulated. This way, positive statements about comparable concepts that are absent for the target concept become seeds for negative statement candidates. The large set of candidates is then scrutinized, pruned and ranked by informativeness. Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. A large dataset of informative negations is released as a resource for future research.
Inside ASCENT: Exploring a Deep Commonsense Knowledge Base and its Usage in Question Answering
Nguyen, Tuan-Phong, Razniewski, Simon, Weikum, Gerhard
ASCENT is a fully automated methodology for extracting and consolidating commonsense assertions from web contents (Nguyen et al., WWW 2021). It advances traditional triple-based commonsense knowledge representation by capturing semantic facets like locations and purposes, and composite concepts, i.e., subgroups and related aspects of subjects. In this demo, we present a web portal that allows users to understand its construction process, explore its content, and observe its impact in the use case of question answering. The demo website and an introductory video are both available online.
Demand-Weighted Completeness Prediction for a Knowledge Base
Hopkinson, Andrew, Gurdasani, Amit, Palfrey, Dave, Mittal, Arpit
In this paper we introduce the notion of Demand-Weighted Completeness, allowing estimation of the completeness of a knowledge base with respect to how it is used. Defining an entity by its classes, we employ usage data to predict the distribution over relations for that entity. For example, instances of person in a knowledge base may require a birth date, name and nationality to be considered complete. These predicted relation distributions enable detection of important gaps in the knowledge base, and define the required facts for unseen entities. Such characterisation of the knowledge base can also quantify how usage and completeness change over time. We demonstrate a method to measure Demand-Weighted Completeness, and show that a simple neural network model performs well at this prediction task.