  Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) aims to answer a question over a
knowledge base (KB). Early studies mainly focused on answering simple questions
over KBs and achieved great success. However, their performance on complex
questions is still far from satisfactory. Therefore, in recent years,
researchers propose a large number of novel methods, which looked into the
challenges of answering complex questions. In this survey, we review recent
advances on KBQA with the focus on solving complex questions, which usually
contain multiple subjects, express compound relations, or involve numerical
operations. In detail, we begin with introducing the complex KBQA task and
relevant background. Then, we describe benchmark datasets for complex KBQA task
and introduce the construction process of these datasets. Next, we present two
mainstream categories of methods for complex KBQA, namely semantic
parsing-based (SP-based) methods and information retrieval-based (IR-based)
methods. Specifically, we illustrate their procedures with flow designs and
discuss their major differences and similarities. After that, we summarize the
challenges that these two categories of methods encounter when answering
complex questions, and explicate advanced solutions and techniques used in
existing work. Finally, we conclude and discuss several promising directions
related to complex KBQA for future research.
