HiAM: A Hierarchical Attention based Model for knowledge graph multi-hop reasoning

Recently, large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs) have become a key asset for search, analytics, recommendations and data integration. Large-scale KGs provide millions of facts about the real world. Each fact is composed as (subject, relation, object), e.g., the triplet (“Cristiano Ronaldo”, playFor, “Real Madrid”). However, these facts are blind to the temporal dimension. Actually, knowledge in practice is time-variant and many relations are only valid for a certain period of time. This phenomenon highlights the importance of building temporal knowledge graphs. In particular, knowledge in temporal KG is represented as (subject, relation, object, valid time), e.g., (“Cristiano Ronaldo”, playFor, “Real Madrid”, “[2009, 2018]”. However, research on temporal KG is very current and there are still many problems needed to be addressed. One obvious problem is that the size of temporal KG is still very small. For example, only 6.6% of the facts are time-aware in one of the largest knowledge graphs, YAGO3. In addition, 71% of people have no known place of birth, and 75% have no known nationality in Freebase. Furthermore, over 87.7% of the facts are uncovered in Japanese DBpedia compared with English DBpedia. Therefore, in this thesis, we study how to enlarge and enrich temporal knowledge graphs from three aspects, namely, temporal KG enrichment. In particular, we study the enrichment problem from the following aspects: (1) volume, (2) completeness, and (3) coverage.Our first solution is temporal knowledge harvesting which extracts temporal knowledge from free text directly. However, text corpus is noisy, and extracting structured temporal facts with high accuracy and coverage is very challenging. Inspired by pattern-based systems, we propose a temporal knowledge harvesting framework. In particular, we propose various techniques to extract temporal patterns, including corpus annotation, pattern generation, scoring and clustering. These techniques can reduce ambiguity in the text corpus and can improve both the accuracy and coverage of the extracted patterns. Second, we leverage the extracted patterns to harvest temporal knowledge. To improve the accuracy, we propose a parse-tree-based method. And to increase the coverage, we consider the relationships between tree components, including part of speech (POS), clause types, constituency and dependency. Experiments on real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed framework.Our second solution is temporal knowledge graph completion. Temporal KG completion is the task of inferring unobserved edges between entity pairs. Generally, temporal KG completion relies on the temporal KG embeddings technique, which learns the low-dimensional representations of all KG components. As research on temporal KG embedding is very current, we study both the embedding and the completion problems. In particular, we observe that contexts are extremely useful for learning the representations of entities and for inferring the unknown time intervals. As a result, we propose a context-aware embedding model for KG embeddings and a context-based temporal inference model for KG completion. In our embedding model, we not only capture factual plausibility as traditional methods did, but also propose a new measure on contexts, named temporal consistency. It measures how well the target entity interacts with its surrounding contexts on the temporal dimension. Our completion model is based on the embedding model, and further captures the interactions on the entity dimension. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our models.Our third solution is temporal knowledge graph alignment which aims to discover the SameAs edges across two temporal KGs. Not like previous attribute-based alignment models, we further divide attribute facts into character facts, digit facts and time facts. In particular, we observe that the context information is extremely useful for the identification of the same entities. Therefore, we propose an alignment model on leveraging temporal contexts to represent entities. However, contexts of the same object can be very different. For example, the value of career predicate changed from “football player” to “coach” for the football player “Zidane”. This is because entities are evolving over time and thus the predicate values can be different. In our framework, we propose an alignment module that simulates the entity evolving process. Specifically, this module captures the interactions between contexts and aggregates context information to represent the entity. Lastly, we found that not all contexts are relevant, e.g., height v.s. career. Actually, only the relevant contexts are useful for capturing the evolving. Therefore, we propose a clustering approach for grouping relevant contexts together. Our experimental results validate the superiority of our proposed alignment model.

A knowledge graph (KG) consists of numerous triples, in which each triple, i.e., (head entity, relation, tail entity), denotes a real-world assertion. Many large-scale KGs have been developed, e.g., general-purpose KGs Freebase and YAGO. Also, lots of domain-specific KGs are emerging, e.g., COVID-19 KGs, biomedical KGs, and agricultural KGs. By embedding KGs into low-dimensional vectors, i.e., representations of entities and relations, we could integrate KGs into machine learning models and enhance the performance of many prediction tasks, including search, recommendations, and question answering. During the construction, refinement, embedding, and application of KGs, a variety of KG learning algorithms have been developed to handle challenges in various real-world scenarios. Moreover, graph neural networks have also brought new opportunities to KG learning. This workshop aims to engage with active researchers from KG communities, recommendation communities, natural language processing communities, and other communities, and deliver state-of-the-art research insights into the core challenges in KG learning.

Knowledge graphs exhibit a typical hierarchical structure and find extensive applications in various artificial intelligence domains. However, large-scale knowledge graphs need to be completed, which limits the performance of knowledge graphs in downstream tasks. Knowledge graph embedding methods have emerged as a primary solution to enhance knowledge graph completeness. These methods aim to represent entities and relations as low-dimensional vectors, focusing on handling relation patterns and multi-relation types. Researchers need to pay more attention to the crucial feature of hierarchical relationships in real-world knowledge graphs. We propose a novel knowledge graph embedding model called Hierarchy-Aware Paired Relation Vectors Knowledge Graph Embedding (HPRE) to bridge this gap. By leveraging the power of 2D coordinates, HPRE adeptly model relation patterns, multi-relation types, and hierarchical features in the knowledge graph. Specifically, HPRE employs paired relation vectors to capture the distinct characteristics of head and tail entities, facilitating a better fit for relational patterns and multi-relation scenarios. Additionally, HPRE employs angular coordinates to differentiate entities at various levels of the hierarchy, effectively representing the hierarchical nature of the knowledge graph. The experimental results show that the HPRE model can effectively learn the hierarchical features of the knowledge graph and achieve state-of-the-art experimental results on multiple real-world datasets for the link prediction task.

Multi-hop reasoning provides a means for inferring indirect relationships and missing information from knowledge graphs (KGs). Reinforcement learning (RL) was recently employed for multi-hop reasoning. Although RL-based methods provide explainability, they face challenges such as sparse rewards, spurious paths, large action spaces, and long training and running times. In this study, we present a novel approach that combines KG embeddings and RL strategies for multi-hop reasoning called path-based multi-hop reasoning (PMHR). We address the issues of sparse rewards and spurious paths by incorporating a well-designed reward function that combines soft rewards with rule-based rewards. The rewards are adjusted based on the target entity and the path to it. Furthermore, we perform action filtering and utilize the vectors of entities and relations acquired through KG embeddings to initialize the environment, thereby significantly reducing the runtime. Experiments involving a comprehensive performance evaluation, efficiency analysis, ablation studies, and a case study were performed. The experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PMHR in improving KG reasoning accuracy while preserving interpretability. Compared to existing state-of-the-art models, PMHR achieved Hit@1 improvements of 0.63%, 2.02%, and 3.17% on the UMLS, Kinship, and NELL-995 datasets, respectively. PMHR provides not only improved reasoning accuracy and explainability but also optimized computational efficiency, thereby offering a robust solution for multi-hop reasoning.

The task of entity relation extraction discovers new relation facts and enables broader applications of knowledge graph. Distant supervision is widely adopted for relation extraction, which requires large amounts of texts containing entity pairs as training data. However, in some specific domains such as medical-related applications, entity pairs that have certain relations might not appear together, thus it is difficult to meet the requirement for distantly supervised relation extraction. In the light of this challenge, we propose a novel path-based model to discover new entity relation facts. Instead of finding texts for relation extraction, the proposed method extracts path-only information for entity pairs from the current knowledge graph. For each pair of entities, multiple paths can be extracted, and some of them are more useful for relation extraction than others. In order to capture this observation, we employ attention mechanism to assign different weights for different paths, which highlights the useful paths for entity relation extraction. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct various experiments on a large-scale medical knowledge graph. Compared with the state-of-the-art relation extraction methods using the structure of knowledge graph, the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of extracted relation facts and achieves the best performance.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are essential resources for many applications including Web search and question answering. As KGs are often automatically constructed, they may contain incorrect facts. Detecting them is a crucial, yet extremely expensive task. Prominent solutions detect and explain inconsistency in KGs with respect to accompanying ontologies that describe the KG domain of interest. Compared to machine learning methods they are more reliable and human-interpretable but scale poorly on large KGs. In this paper, we present a novel approach to dramatically speed up the process of detecting and explaining inconsistency in large KGs by exploiting KG abstractions that capture prominent data patterns. Though much smaller, KG abstractions preserve inconsistency and their explanations. Our experiments with large KGs (e.g., DBpedia and Yago) demonstrate the feasibility of our approach and show that it significantly outperforms the popular baseline.

Multi-hop logical reasoning on knowledge graphs is a pivotal task in natural language processing, with numerous approaches aiming to answer First-Order Logic (FOL) queries.Recent geometry (e.g., box, cone) and probability (e.g., beta distribution)-based methodologies have effectively addressed complex FOL queries.However, a common challenge across these methods lies in determining accurate geometric bounds or probability parameters for these queries.The challenge arises because existing methods rely on linear sequential operations within their computation graphs, overlooking the logical structure of the query and the relation-induced information that can be gleaned from the relations of the query, which we call the context of the query.To address the problem, we propose a modelagnostic methodology that enhances the effectiveness of existing multi-hop logical reasoning approaches by fully integrating the context of the FOL query graph.Our approach distinctively discerns (1) the structural context inherent to the query structure and (2) the relation-induced context unique to each node in the query graph as delineated in the corresponding knowledge graph.This dual-context paradigm helps nodes within a query graph attain refined internal representations throughout the multi-hop reasoning steps.Through experiments on two datasets, our method consistently enhances the three multi-hop reasoning foundation models, achieving performance improvements of up to 19.5%.

Hierarchical Knowledge-Enhancement Framework for multi-hop knowledge graph reasoning

Top-[formula omitted] star queries on knowledge graphs through semantic-aware bounding match scores

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. Among available sources, knowledge graphs (KGs) offer a structured and reliable foundation for factual information, making them increasingly popular in efforts to improve reasoning faithfulness in RAG. Most existing KG-based RAG methods rely on LLMs to extract knowledge from KGs. However, these approaches often require costly fine-tuning and struggle to navigate deep graph structures, limiting their effectiveness in multi-hop reasoning tasks. To address these challenges, we propose Stepwise Contrastive Reasoning (SCR), a lightweight framework that integrates graph structure and textual context for efficient and interpretable RAG over KGs. SCR combines relational message passing layers to encode KG entities with a Transformer encoder for processing question text. It decomposes reasoning into a series of alignment steps. At each step, SCR compares the current topic entity and its neighbors with the question representation, selecting the most relevant entity as the next topic entity. The question is then updated with this entity's textual description. This process continues until the selected entity no longer changes, indicating that the answer entity has been reached. Through stepwise alignment, SCR enables compact models to perform faithful and interpretable reasoning over large-scale KGs. Extensive experiments on several widely used KGQA benchmarks demonstrate that SCR not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also effectively boosts the capabilities of smaller language models to match those of LLMs.

In the current development of large language models (LLMs), it is important to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the underlying data sources. LLMs are critical for various applications, but they often suffer from hallucinations and inaccuracies due to knowledge gaps in the training data. Knowledge graphs (KGs), as a powerful structural tool, could serve as a vital external information source to mitigate the aforementioned issues. By providing a structured and comprehensive understanding of real-world data, KGs enhance the performance and reliability of LLMs. However, it is common that errors exist in KGs while extracting triplets from unstructured data to construct KGs. This could lead to degraded performance in downstream tasks such as question-answering and recommender systems. Therefore, anomaly detection in KGs is essential to identify and correct these errors. This article presents an anomaly detection algorithm in knowledge graphs with dual-channel learning (ADKGD). ADKGD leverages a dual-channel learning approach to enhance representation learning from both the entity-view and triplet-view perspectives. Furthermore, using a cross-layer approach, our framework integrates internal information aggregation and context information aggregation. We introduce a kullback-leibler (KL)-loss component to improve the accuracy of the scoring function between the dual channels. To evaluate ADKGD’s performance, we conduct empirical studies on three real-world KGs: WN18RR, FB15K, and NELL-995. Experimental results demonstrate that ADKGD outperforms state-of-the-art anomaly detection algorithms. The source code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/csjywu1/ADKGD .

EASC: An exception-aware semantic compression framework for real-world knowledge graphs

Exploiting semantic patterns over biomedical knowledge graphs for predicting treatment and causative relations

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly used for solving or supporting tasks such as question answering or recommendation. To achieve a useful performance on such tasks, it is important that the knowledge modeled by KGs is as correct and complete as possible. While this is an elusive goal for many domains, techniques for automated KG construction (AKGC) serve as a means to approach it. Yet, AKGC has many open challenges, like learning expressive ontologies or incorporating long-tail entities. With CaLiGraph, we present a KG automatically constructed from categories and lists in Wikipedia, offering a rich taxonomy with semantic class descriptions and a broad coverage of entities. We describe its extraction framework and provide details about its purpose, resources, usage, and quality. Further, we evaluate the performance of CaLiGraph on downstream tasks and compare it to other popular KGs.

Predicting relations involves deducing the absent connections between entities within a knowledge graph. Knowledge graph embedding has recently emerged as a technique to represent entities and their relationships in a condensed vector space. While effective for entity prediction tasks, this approach escalates in complexity, particularly for extensive knowledge graphs. This study introduces a new method for relation prediction in knowledge graphs, employing a mechanism termed Local and Neighbor Aware Entity Embedding (LNAEE). LNAEE utilizes skip-gram initialization to capture local entity features at the triple level. It then employs an attention mechanism to update the central entity’s features based on its immediate neighbors. Finally, a multilayer neural network predicts the most likely relationship type between the given entity pair. LNAEE is streamlined and less intricate owing to the reduced relation search space. Benchmark dataset experiments demonstrate that LNAEE outperforms the baselines. This makes LNAEE ideal for applications requiring a lightweight and affordable model for knowledge graph enrichment.