SAGA: Schema-Aware Grounding for Agentic Text-to-SPARQL Generation

Abstract

Complex knowledge base question answering (KBQA) is commonly approached through either information retrieval over a question-specific subgraph or semantic parsing into an executable logical form. We study the latter paradigm. Recent large language model agents make semantic parsing interactive: they alternate between reasoning, querying the knowledge base, and extending a partial SPARQL query. This interleaving reduces reliance on one-shot generation, but makes the quality of \emph{KB grounding} depend on what the interaction tools expose. Existing agents retrieve or prune candidate properties mainly through lexical relevance and instance-level observations, without systematically conditioning on entity types, property domains and ranges, or the expected answer type. We call this failure mode \emph{type-blind grounding}. It enlarges the grounding search space and often produces plausible-looking but semantically incompatible triple patterns that execute to empty results. We propose SAGA (\underline{S}chema-\underline{A}ware \underline{G}rounding for \underline{A}gentic Text-to-SPARQL Generation), a training-free framework that turns property exploration into a schema-constrained grounding operation. SAGA maintains a persistent bidirectional type state, filters known-incompatible property candidates at construction time, presents the remaining graph patterns in a compact schema-annotated format, and handles missing schema information permissively through empirical and trace-local evidence. Across nine benchmark settings over Wikidata and Freebase, SAGA achieves the highest F1 on all nine settings and the highest exact-match accuracy on eight, while reducing empty-result queries across all reported Wikidata settings.