NS-ST-GraphRAG: Neuro-Symbolic Spatio-Temporal GraphRAG for Literary Knowledge Processing

Abstract:Long-form literary narratives pose a distinctive information-processing challenge for retrieval-augmented generation: relevant evidence is distributed across chapters, relations evolve over narrative time, and correct answers may depend jointly on temporal, spatial, and relational constraints. We propose NS-ST-GraphRAG, a neuro-symbolic spatio-temporal GraphRAG framework that integrates ontology-guided extraction, deterministic constraint checking, dual temporal coordinates, spatial scene attributes, and dynamic sub-graph retrieval. Instead of retrieving from a single corpus-level graph, the framework selects the graph state valid for the temporal and spatial scope of a query and grounds generated answers in traceable evidence. We further introduce Red-Chamber-QA, to our knowledge the first open multi-hop question-answering benchmark for classical Chinese literature, with time-, space-, and general-question categories, per-part evidence spans, and deterministic shortcut controls. On a 120-question held-out split, NS-ST-GraphRAG achieves mechanical answer reproduction of 0.733 versus 0.675 for the frozen window baseline and 0.083 for a closed-book model (McNemar exact p = 0.092, directionally favorable but not significant); semantic-judge accuracy is 0.866 versus 0.850. The pre-specified constrained-category condition of H2 is not supported by the delivered comparison. These results show how temporal graph representation, constrained extraction, and auditable evaluation integrate into a unified framework for verifiable knowledge processing over long-form narrative.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

H.3.3; I.2.7; I.2.4; H.3.1

arXiv:2609.05139 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.05139v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.05139 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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