natural language processing

Detecting Knowledge Inconsistencies Across Text, Tables, and Knowledge Graphs

arXiv:2607.25959

summary

The paper introduces Kontrast, a framework that automatically detects and categorizes inconsistencies between textual information, tables, and knowledge graphs by converting text to SPARQL queries and using LLM reasoning.

Abstract

Wikipedia and Wikidata are widely used for information access, LLM pre-training, and retrieval-augmented generation. Their knowledge is deeply connected but scattered across text, tables, and knowledge graphs. This raises a practical question: when these modalities disagree, how can we detect and explain the conflict? We study this problem as modality-level inconsistency detection. We first introduce a taxonomy of cross-modal knowledge inconsistencies, covering information granularity differences, direct conflicts, temporal changes, and KG incompleteness. We then present Kontrast, an automatic framework that uses Text-to-SPARQL and LLM reasoning to compare table-based answers with KG evidence and categorize the resulting inconsistencies. Experiments on various Table-QA datasets show that cross-modal inconsistencies are common and informative. They reveal not only true knowledge conflicts, but also missing KG structure and temporal mismatches while being limited by Text-to-SPARQL errors and noise. Our analysis shows that text, tables, and KGs can complement and correct one another through systematic comparison. Kontrast provides a practical tool for large-scale knowledge auditing and establishes a benchmark for future work on cross-modal knowledge consistency. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ECLADATTA/KONTRAST.

Topics & keywords

#knowledge consistency#multimodal data#tables#knowledge graphs#question answeringtext-to-sparqlLLM reasoningcross-modal inconsistency detectiontable QAknowledge auditing