The technology described herein receives a natural-language sequence of words comprising multiple entities. The technology then identifies a plurality of entities in the natural-language sequence. The technology generates a masked natural-language sequence by masking a first entity in the natural-language sequence. The technology retrieves, from a knowledge base, information related to a second entity in the plurality of entities. The technology then trains a natural-language model to respond to a query. The training uses a first representation of the masked natural-language sequence, a second representation of the information, and the first entity.