Knowledge-Graph Based Augmentation versus Retrieval Augmented Generation for Cultural-Related Question Answering

arXiv:2609.18317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) suffer from a long-tail deficit: culturally specific facts, particularly those concerning underrepresented regions such as Latin America, appear too rarely in pretraining corpora to be reliably memorized. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this by grounding generation in external text, but structured alternatives such as Knowledge Graphs (KGs) offer tighter control over what enters the context, along with potential gains in explainability and updatability. We benchmark Graph-RAG against standard RAG on LatamQA, a culturally grounded multiple-choice dataset spanning eight thematic categories. The graphs are built end-to-end from Wikipedia articles with KGGen, a recent open-domain extractor, without manual curation in our main setting. G-Retriever is competitive with RAG and reduces the error of the base LLM by 72% with a standard KG and 78% with a benchmark-aware variant, the gap to RAG narrowing further as the graph is oriented toward task-relevant content. The trained projection transfers zero-shot to Portuguese without target-language fine-tuning, indicating multilingual reach.

Related

• KGCaRe: Explainable Complex Conditional Question Answering using Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction and Context Retrieval with LLMs
• STAR: Semantic-Tuned and Tail-Adaptive Retriever for Graph-Augmented Generation
• Reducing Hallucinations in Complex Question Answering using Simple Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (long version)
• Automated Tree Knowledge Graph Construction using Ontology Expansion and Retrieval from Vietnamese History Textbooks

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-09-17