[CfP] WikiKGQA: Wiki-Based Knowledge Graph Question Answering Challenge at ISWC 2026 - Deadline: June 19th (challenge) / July 17th (challenge papers)

[Apologies for cross-postings]

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce WikiKGQA: Wiki-Based Knowledge Graph Question 
Answering Challenge co-located with the 25th International Semantic Web 
Conference (https://iswc2026.semanticweb.org/), Bari, Italy.

Challenge website: https://wikikgqa.org
The competition takes place on the Codabench platform: 
https://www.codabench.org/competitions/15358/

Important links and dates:
- Training data + challenge platform: 
https://www.codabench.org/competitions/15358/
- Challenge solution submission: June 19, 2026 (11:59pm, AoE)
- Challenge results: July 10, 2026
- Paper submissions: July 17, 2026 (11:59pm, AoE)
- Paper acceptance notification: August 21, 2026
- Workshop days: October 25 OR 26, 2026

Motivation:

KGQA has a long tradition in the Semantic Web community, particularly 
under the Question Answering over Linked Data (QALD) moniker and 
challenge series. With the rise of LLMs, the performance of 
state-of-the-art systems has improved dramatically. However, benchmark 
datasets in the space exhibit well-known limitations, primarily due to 
the manual cost of creating parallel corpora of natural language 
questions and structured queries. To address these issues, QAWiki 
(https://qawiki.org) proposes a collaboratively-edited community 
resource of hand-crafted question-query pairs, focusing currently on 
English & Spanish questions answered over Wikidata's SPARQL query 
service. The motivation is two-fold: (1) to evaluate KGQA systems over a 
hand-crafted collection of multilingual question-query pairs over 
Wikidata, and (2) to build a community centered around QAWiki, to expand 
and improve it, and thus expand and improve the resources available for 
training and benchmarking of KGQA systems.

Task Description:

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) offers a promising alternative 
to end-to-end QA systems by obtaining truthful answers from trusted and 
well-maintained knowledge sources, such as Wikidata, without losing the 
flexibility of natural language input. Nevertheless, the creation of 
large high-quality KGQA benchmarks remains a challenge, with many 
benchmarks being small, containing errors or repetitive questions that 
are rarely fixed. Therefore, building on QAWiki, this challenge aims to 
make the creation of KGQA benchmarks a collaborative effort, just like 
Wikidata itself.

For evaluation, a private test dataset will be created, which would be 
integrated with QAWiki after the challenge. Over the years, we aim to 
build an evolving high-quality KGQA dataset of increasing size.

English and Spanish queries will be ranked separately, each participant 
can choose to participate only for one or for both languages. The task 
itself consists of two sub-tasks for each language:
1. KGQA using only the input question
2. KGQA using the input question together with the metadata QAWiki 
provides, i.e., entity and property annotations

In both sub-tasks, the goal is to generate an answer set for that 
question based on the version of Wikidata accessible via the WikiKGQA 
SPARQL endpoint or using the available Wikidata dump (more details at 
the Codabench competition page). As an evaluation metric, Macro QALD F1 
scores will be used to evaluate the result sets. The full training data 
is available under https://www.codabench.org/competitions/15358/ as an 
extended version of QALD_JSON 
(https://www.nliwod.org/challenge#task-1-multilingual-question-answering-over-knowledge-graphs).

Submission Guidelines:
We invite submissions of English challenge papers (up to 8 pages 
excluding references). All submissions should be formatted in the CEUR 
layout 
https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/template-for-submissions-to-ceur-workshop-proceedings-ceur-ws-dot-org/wqyfdgftmcfw 


A prerequisite for submitting a challenge paper is to submit challenge 
solutions of your approach to at least one of the tracks on Codabench: 
https://www.codabench.org/competitions/1535.
Additionally, each participant/team has to let the organizers know their 
team name such that Codabench submissions can be linked to paper 
submissions later.
Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wikikgqa2026
Codabench: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/15358/
Google Groups list: https://groups.google.com/g/wikikgqa-challenge-list/

The central communication platform for the challenge (aside from the 
website) is the corresponding Google Groups list: 
https://groups.google.com/g/wikikgqa-challenge-list/
For private concerns or questions, please contact David Maria Schmidt 
(david.schmidt@uni-bielefeld.de) or any other organizer directly.

Follow us on social media!
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wikikgqa/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/wikikgqa.bsky.social
Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@wikikgqa

Workshop Organizers:
- Shakeeb Arzoo, CRISIL Ltd., S&P Global Ratings
- Debayan Banerjee, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
- Philipp Cimiano, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany
- Aidan Hogan, DCC, Universidad de Chile
- Alberto Moya Loustaunau, DCC, Universidad de Chile
- David Maria Schmidt, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany
- Ricardo Usbeck, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany


-- 
David Maria Schmidt
Cognitive Interaction Technology Center (CITEC)
Universität Bielefeld
Inspiration 1
33619 Bielefeld
Germany
Mail: david.schmidt@uni-bielefeld.de
Web: https://davidmariaschmidt.de/

Received on Friday, 17 April 2026 20:36:38 UTC