PerQA

PerQA is a benchmark for question answering (QA) over personal data, which appears in heterogeneous form. Each persona has demographic profile data, a canonicalized event log (structured events loadable via DBs), a corresponding observable event log (verbalized and thus realistic events, in natural surface forms), and natural-language questions answerable with SQL over those events. Observable events stem from different source types: social media posts, calendar data, mails, workout history, streaming behavior (movies, tv series, music), and online purchases. The QA system has to tap into those different personal data sources for answering questions that involve complexities such as joins, grouping, or temporal filters.

Please find further information, a demo and code for our ReQAP QA system on our project webpage: https://reqap.mpi-inf.mpg.de.

Splits

The data is split at the persona and question level (personas and questions are unique within splits):

Split	Personas	Questions (approx.)
train	12	14,300
validation	2	275
test	6	3,000

Dataset configs

The dataset consists of four parts:

Name	Description
questions	NL questions with SQL queries and gold answers
personas	One row per persona; profile is a JSON string of the full profile object
canonicalized_events	Canonicalized events (for deriving the ground-truth)
observable_events	Derived observable events (realistic events in natural surface forms), linked via canonicalized_event_id

Loading

from datasets import load_dataset

questions = load_dataset("pchristm/PerQA", "questions")
personas = load_dataset("pchristm/PerQA", "personas")
canonicalized = load_dataset("pchristm/PerQA", "canonicalized_events", split="train")
observable = load_dataset("pchristm/PerQA", "observable_events", split="test")

Filter events or questions for one persona:

pid = "train_persona_0"
q = questions["train"].filter(lambda row: row["persona_id"] == pid)
events = canonicalized.filter(lambda row: row["persona_id"] == pid)
persona = json.loads(personas.filter(lambda row: row["persona_id"] == pid)[0]["profile"])

JSON columns (answers, profile, event_data, properties_mentioned) are stored as JSON strings in Parquet for schema stability. Parse them after loading:

import json

row = questions["train"][0]
answers = json.loads(row["answers"]) if row["answers"] else None

Questions schema

Field	Type	Description
id	string	Unique id, e.g. train_persona_0-question_0
q_id	int	Index within persona
persona_id	string	Split-local persona id
original_persona	string	Source pool id, e.g. persona_22
split	string	train, validation, or test
question	string	First-person natural-language question
sql_query	string	PostgreSQL query over event tables
answers	string (JSON)	Gold answer(s) as JSON array, or null; parse with json.loads
reference_date	string	Fixed eval date for CURRENT_DATE in SQL (2024-11-25)

Events schema

Canonicalized events (canonicalized_events):

Field	Description
id	Event id
start_date, start_time, end_date, end_time	Timestamps
event_type	e.g. music_stream, meet_up, trip
event_data	Parsed JSON payload (stored as JSON string in Parquet)
persona_id, split	Persona and split

Observable events (observable_events): same columns plus canonicalized_event_id (links to canonicalized id) and properties_mentioned (list of canonicalized fields surfaced in this observation).

Canonicalized event types include music_stream, movie_stream, meet_up, workout, online_purchase, tvseries_stream, trip, trip_highlight, annual_celebration, annual_doctor_appointment, oneoff_event. Observable types add derived channels such as calendar, mail, and social_media.

Deriving ground-truth answers

SQL queries use PostgreSQL syntax and CURRENT_DATE. For reproducible evaluation, treat reference_date (2024-11-25) as the current date when executing queries. Those SQL queries can be utilized to derive ground-truth answers based on the canonicalized events. The canonicalized events should not be used during inference.

Related Papers

@inproceedings{christmann2026perqa,
  title     = {PerQA: A Benchmark for Temporally Sensitive Questions on Heterogeneous Personal Data},
  author    = {Christmann, Philipp and Weikum, Gerhard},
  booktitle = {Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026},
  url       = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3774905.3795448},
  pages     = {1100--1106},
  year      = {2026}
}

@inproceedings{christmann2025recursive,
  title     = {Recursive Question Understanding for Complex Question Answering over Heterogeneous Personal Data},
  author    = {Christmann, Philipp and Weikum, Gerhard},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.939/},
  pages     = {18269--18288},
  year      = {2025}
}