Entity alignment (EA) aims to find entities in different knowledge graphs (KGs) that refer to the same object in the real world. Recent studies incorporate temporal information to augment the representations of KGs. The existing methods for EA between temporal KGs (TKGs) utilize a time-aware attention mechanism to incorporate relational and temporal information into entity embeddings. The approaches outperform the previous methods by using temporal information. However, we believe that it is not necessary to learn the embeddings of temporal information in KGs since most TKGs have uniform temporal representations. Therefore, we propose a simple graph neural network (GNN) model combined with a temporal information matching mechanism, which achieves better performance with less time and fewer parameters. Furthermore, since alignment seeds are difficult to label in real-world applications, we also propose a method to generate unsupervised alignment seeds via the temporal information of TKG. Extensive experiments on public datasets indicate that our supervised method significantly outperforms the previous methods and the unsupervised one has competitive performance.
Entity alignment aims to discover unique equivalent entity pairs with the same meaning across different knowledge graphs (KGs). Existing models have focused on projecting KGs into a latent embedding space so that inherent semantics between entities can be captured for entity alignment. However, the adverse impacts of alignment conflicts have been largely overlooked during training, thereby limiting the entity alignment performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Conflict-aware Pseudo Labeling via Optimal Transport model (CPL-OT) for entity alignment. The key idea is to iteratively pseudo-label alignment pairs empowered with conflict-aware optimal transport (OT) modeling to boost the precision of entity alignment. CPL-OT is composed of two key components -- entity embedding learning with global-local aggregation and iterative conflict-aware pseudo labeling -- that mutually reinforce each other. To mitigate alignment conflicts during pseudo labeling, we propose to use optimal transport as an effective means to warrant one-to-one entity alignment between two KGs with the minimal overall transport cost. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the superiority of CPL-OT over state-of-the-art baselines under both settings with and without prior alignment seeds.
Multi-modal entity alignment aims to identify equivalent entities between two different multi-modal knowledge graphs, which consist of structural triples and images associated with entities. Most previous works focus on how to utilize and encode information from different modalities, while it is not trivial to leverage multi-modal knowledge in entity alignment because of the modality heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose MCLEA, a Multi-modal Contrastive Learning based Entity Alignment model, to obtain effective joint representations for multi-modal entity alignment. Different from previous works, MCLEA considers task-oriented modality and models the inter-modal relationships for each entity representation. In particular, MCLEA firstly learns multiple individual representations from multiple modalities, and then performs contrastive learning to jointly model intra-modal and inter-modal interactions. Extensive experimental results show that MCLEA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on public datasets under both supervised and unsupervised settings.
Entity alignment is a crucial task in knowledge graph fusion. However, most entity alignment approaches have the scalability problem. Recent methods address this issue by dividing large KGs into small blocks for embedding and alignment learning in each. However, such a partitioning and learning process results in an excessive loss of structure and alignment. Therefore, in this work, we propose a scalable GNN-based entity alignment approach to reduce the structure and alignment loss from three perspectives. First, we propose a centrality-based subgraph generation algorithm to recall some landmark entities serving as the bridges between different subgraphs. Second, we introduce self-supervised entity reconstruction to recover entity representations from incomplete neighborhood subgraphs, and design cross-subgraph negative sampling to incorporate entities from other subgraphs in alignment learning. Third, during the inference process, we merge the embeddings of subgraphs to make a single space for alignment search. Experimental results on the benchmark OpenEA dataset and the proposed large DBpedia1M dataset verify the effectiveness of our approach.
Entity Alignment (EA) aims to match equivalent entities that refer to the same real-world objects and is a key step for Knowledge Graph (KG) fusion. Most neural EA models cannot be applied to large-scale real-life KGs due to their excessive consumption of GPU memory and time. One promising solution is to divide a large EA task into several subtasks such that each subtask only needs to match two small subgraphs of the original KGs. However, it is challenging to divide the EA task without losing effectiveness. Existing methods display low coverage of potential mappings, insufficient evidence in context graphs, and largely differing subtask sizes. In this work, we design the DivEA framework for large-scale EA with high-quality task division. To include in the EA subtasks a high proportion of the potential mappings originally present in the large EA task, we devise a counterpart discovery method that exploits the locality principle of the EA task and the power of trained EA models. Unique to our counterpart discovery method is the explicit modelling of the chance of a potential mapping. We also introduce an evidence passing mechanism to quantify the informativeness of context entities and find the most informative context graphs with flexible control of the subtask size. Extensive experiments show that DivEA achieves higher EA performance than alternative state-of-the-art solutions.
The booming of multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs) has raised the imperative demand for multi-modal entity alignment techniques, which facilitate the integration of multiple MMKGs from separate data sources. Unfortunately, prior arts harness multi-modal knowledge only via the heuristic merging of uni-modal feature embeddings. Therefore, inter-modal cues concealed in multi-modal knowledge could be largely ignored. To deal with that problem, in this paper, we propose a novel Multi-modal Siamese Network for Entity Alignment (MSNEA) to align entities in different MMKGs, in which multi-modal knowledge could be comprehensively leveraged by the exploitation of inter-modal effect. Specifically, we first devise a multi-modal knowledge embedding module to extract visual, relational, and attribute features of entities to generate holistic entity representations for distinct MMKGs. During this procedure, we employ inter-modal enhancement mechanisms to integrate visual features to guide relational feature learning and adaptively assign attention weights to capture valuable attributes for alignment. Afterwards, we design a multi-modal contrastive learning module to achieve inter-modal enhancement fusion with avoiding the overwhelming impact of weak modalities. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that our proposed MSNEA provides state-of-the-art performance with a large margin compared with competitive baselines.
Entity alignment is a basic and vital technique in knowledge graph (KG) integration. Over the years, research on entity alignment has resided on the assumption that KGs are static, which neglects the nature of growth of real-world KGs. As KGs grow, previous alignment results face the need to be revisited while new entity alignment waits to be discovered. In this paper, we propose and dive into a realistic yet unexplored setting, referred to as continual entity alignment. To avoid retraining an entire model on the whole KGs whenever new entities and triples come, we present a continual alignment method for this task. It reconstructs an entity's representation based on entity adjacency, enabling it to generate embeddings for new entities quickly and inductively using their existing neighbors. It selects and replays partial pre-aligned entity pairs to train only parts of KGs while extracting trustworthy alignment for knowledge augmentation. As growing KGs inevitably contain non-matchable entities, different from previous works, the proposed method employs bidirectional nearest neighbor matching to find new entity alignment and update old alignment. Furthermore, we also construct new datasets by simulating the growth of multilingual DBpedia. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our continual alignment method is more effective than baselines based on retraining or inductive learning.
This paper presents $\mu\text{KG}$, an open-source Python library for representation learning over knowledge graphs. $\mu\text{KG}$ supports joint representation learning over multi-source knowledge graphs (and also a single knowledge graph), multiple deep learning libraries (PyTorch and TensorFlow2), multiple embedding tasks (link prediction, entity alignment, entity typing, and multi-source link prediction), and multiple parallel computing modes (multi-process and multi-GPU computing). It currently implements 26 popular knowledge graph embedding models and supports 16 benchmark datasets. $\mu\text{KG}$ provides advanced implementations of embedding techniques with simplified pipelines of different tasks. It also comes with high-quality documentation for ease of use. $\mu\text{KG}$ is more comprehensive than existing knowledge graph embedding libraries. It is useful for a thorough comparison and analysis of various embedding models and tasks. We show that the jointly learned embeddings can greatly help knowledge-powered downstream tasks, such as multi-hop knowledge graph question answering. We will stay abreast of the latest developments in the related fields and incorporate them into $\mu\text{KG}$.
Cybersecurity vulnerability information is often recorded by multiple channels, including government vulnerability repositories, individual-maintained vulnerability-gathering platforms, or vulnerability-disclosure email lists and forums. Integrating vulnerability information from different channels enables comprehensive threat assessment and quick deployment to various security mechanisms. Efforts to automatically gather such information, however, are impeded by the limitations of today's entity alignment techniques. In our study, we annotate the first cybersecurity-domain entity alignment dataset and reveal the unique characteristics of security entities. Based on these observations, we propose the first cybersecurity entity alignment model, CEAM, which equips GNN-based entity alignment with two mechanisms: asymmetric masked aggregation and partitioned attention. Experimental results on cybersecurity-domain entity alignment datasets demonstrate that CEAM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art entity alignment methods.
Large public knowledge graphs, like Wikidata, contain billions of statements about tens of millions of entities, thus inspiring various use cases to exploit such knowledge graphs. However, practice shows that much of the relevant information that fits users' needs is still missing in Wikidata, while current linked open data (LOD) tools are not suitable to enrich large graphs like Wikidata. In this paper, we investigate the potential of enriching Wikidata with structured data sources from the LOD cloud. We present a novel workflow that includes gap detection, source selection, schema alignment, and semantic validation. We evaluate our enrichment method with two complementary LOD sources: a noisy source with broad coverage, DBpedia, and a manually curated source with a narrow focus on the art domain, Getty. Our experiments show that our workflow can enrich Wikidata with millions of novel statements from external LOD sources with high quality. Property alignment and data quality are key challenges, whereas entity alignment and source selection are well-supported by existing Wikidata mechanisms. We make our code and data available to support future work.
Neural methods have become the de-facto choice for the vast majority of data analysis tasks, and entity alignment (EA) is no exception. Not surprisingly, more than 50 different neural EA methods have been published since 2017. However, surprisingly, an analysis of the differences between neural and non-neural EA methods has been lacking. We bridge this gap by performing an in-depth comparison among five carefully chosen representative state-of-the-art methods from the pre-neural and neural era. We unravel, and consequently mitigate, the inherent deficiencies in the experimental setup utilized for evaluating neural EA methods. To ensure fairness in evaluation, we homogenize the entity matching modules of neural and non-neural methods. Additionally, for the first time, we draw a parallel between EA and record linkage (RL) by empirically showcasing the ability of RL methods to perform EA. Our results indicate that Paris, the state-of-the-art non-neural method, statistically significantly outperforms all the representative state-of-the-art neural methods in terms of both efficacy and efficiency across a wide variety of dataset types and scenarios, and is second only to BERT-INT for a specific scenario of cross-lingual EA. Our findings shed light on the potential problems resulting from an impulsive application of neural methods as a panacea for all data analytics tasks. Overall, our work results in two overarching conclusions: (1) Paris should be used as a baseline in every follow-up work on EA, and (2) neural methods need to be positioned better to showcase their true potential, for which we provide multiple recommendations.
Knowledge graph (KG) embedding aims at learning the latent representations for entities and relations of a KG in continuous vector spaces. An empirical observation is that the head (tail) entities connected by the same relation often share similar semantic attributes -- specifically, they often belong to the same category -- no matter how far away they are from each other in the KG; that is, they share global semantic similarities. However, many existing methods derive KG embeddings based on the local information, which fail to effectively capture such global semantic similarities among entities. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach, which introduces a set of virtual nodes called \textit{\textbf{relational prototype entities}} to represent the prototypes of the head and tail entities connected by the same relations. By enforcing the entities' embeddings close to their associated prototypes' embeddings, our approach can effectively encourage the global semantic similarities of entities -- that can be far away in the KG -- connected by the same relation. Experiments on the entity alignment and KG completion tasks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms recent state-of-the-arts.
Entity alignment (EA) aims at finding equivalent entities in different knowledge graphs (KGs). Embedding-based approaches have dominated the EA task in recent years. Those methods face problems that come from the geometric properties of embedding vectors, including hubness and isolation. To solve these geometric problems, many normalization approaches have been adopted for EA. However, the increasing scale of KGs renders it hard for EA models to adopt the normalization processes, thus limiting their usage in real-world applications. To tackle this challenge, we present ClusterEA, a general framework that is capable of scaling up EA models and enhancing their results by leveraging normalization methods on mini-batches with a high entity equivalent rate. ClusterEA contains three components to align entities between large-scale KGs, including stochastic training, ClusterSampler, and SparseFusion. It first trains a large-scale Siamese GNN for EA in a stochastic fashion to produce entity embeddings. Based on the embeddings, a novel ClusterSampler strategy is proposed for sampling highly overlapped mini-batches. Finally, ClusterEA incorporates SparseFusion, which normalizes local and global similarity and then fuses all similarity matrices to obtain the final similarity matrix. Extensive experiments with real-life datasets on EA benchmarks offer insight into the proposed framework, and suggest that it is capable of outperforming the state-of-the-art scalable EA framework by up to 8 times in terms of Hits@1.
Entity Alignment (EA) has attracted widespread attention in both academia and industry, which aims to seek entities with same meanings from different Knowledge Graphs (KGs). There are substantial multi-step relation paths between entities in KGs, indicating the semantic relations of entities. However, existing methods rarely consider path information because not all natural paths facilitate for EA judgment. In this paper, we propose a more effective entity alignment framework, RPR-RHGT, which integrates relation and path structure information, as well as the heterogeneous information in KGs. Impressively, an initial reliable path reasoning algorithm is developed to generate the paths favorable for EA task from the relation structures of KGs, which is the first algorithm in the literature to successfully use unrestricted path information. In addition, to efficiently capture heterogeneous features in entity neighborhoods, a relation-aware heterogeneous graph transformer is designed to model the relation and path structures of KGs. Extensive experiments on three well-known datasets show RPR-RHGT significantly outperforms 11 state-of-the-art methods, exceeding the best performing baseline up to 8.62% on Hits@1. We also show its better performance than the baselines on different ratios of training set, and harder datasets.
Entity Alignment (EA) identifies entities across databases that refer to the same entity. Knowledge graph-based embedding methods have recently dominated EA techniques. Such methods map entities to a low-dimension space and align them based on their similarities. With the corpus of EA methodologies growing rapidly, this paper presents a comprehensive analysis of various existing EA methods, elaborating their applications and limitations. Further, we distinguish the methods based on their underlying algorithms and the information they incorporate to learn entity representations. Based on challenges in industrial datasets, we bring forward $4$ research questions (RQs). These RQs empirically analyse the algorithms from the perspective of \textit{Hubness, Degree distribution, Non-isomorphic neighbourhood,} and \textit{Name bias}. For Hubness, where one entity turns up as the nearest neighbour of many other entities, we define an $h$-score to quantify its effect on the performance of various algorithms. Additionally, we try to level the playing field for algorithms that rely primarily on name-bias existing in the benchmarking open-source datasets by creating a low name bias dataset. We further create an open-source repository for $14$ embedding-based EA methods and present the analysis for invoking further research motivations in the field of EA.
Entity alignment is the task of finding entities representing the same real-world object in two knowledge graphs(KGs). Cross-lingual knowledge graph entity alignment aims to discover the cross-lingual links in the multi-language KGs, which is of great significance to the NLP applications and multi-language KGs fusion. In the task of aligning cross-language knowledge graphs, the structures of the two graphs are very similar, and the equivalent entities often have the same subgraph structure characteristics. The traditional GCN method neglects to obtain structural features through representative parts of the original graph and the use of adjacency matrix is not enough to effectively represent the structural features of the graph. In this paper, we introduce the subgraph network (SGN) method into the GCN-based cross-lingual KG entity alignment method. In the method, we extracted the first-order subgraphs of the KGs to expand the structural features of the original graph to enhance the representation ability of the entity embedding and improve the alignment accuracy. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art GCN-based method.
We study dangling-aware entity alignment in knowledge graphs (KGs), which is an underexplored but important problem. As different KGs are naturally constructed by different sets of entities, a KG commonly contains some dangling entities that cannot find counterparts in other KGs. Therefore, dangling-aware entity alignment is more realistic than the conventional entity alignment where prior studies simply ignore dangling entities. We propose a framework using mixed high-order proximities on dangling-aware entity alignment. Our framework utilizes both the local high-order proximity in a nearest neighbor subgraph and the global high-order proximity in an embedding space for both dangling detection and entity alignment. Extensive experiments with two evaluation settings shows that our framework more precisely detects dangling entities, and better aligns matchable entities. Further investigations demonstrate that our framework can mitigate the hubness problem on dangling-aware entity alignment.
In recent years, we have witnessed the proliferation of knowledge graphs (KG) in various domains, aiming to support applications like question answering, recommendations, etc. A frequent task when integrating knowledge from different KGs is to find which subgraphs refer to the same real-world entity. Recently, embedding methods have been used for entity alignment tasks, that learn a vector-space representation of entities which preserves their similarity in the original KGs. A wide variety of supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised methods have been proposed that exploit both factual (attribute based) and structural information (relation based) of entities in the KGs. Still, a quantitative assessment of their strengths and weaknesses in real-world KGs according to different performance metrics and KG characteristics is missing from the literature. In this work, we conduct the first meta-level analysis of popular embedding methods for entity alignment, based on a statistically sound methodology. Our analysis reveals statistically significant correlations of different embedding methods with various meta-features extracted by KGs and rank them in a statistically significant way according to their effectiveness across all real-world KGs of our testbed. Finally, we study interesting trade-offs in terms of methods' effectiveness and efficiency.
Entity alignment is to find identical entities in different knowledge graphs. Although embedding-based entity alignment has recently achieved remarkable progress, training data insufficiency remains a critical challenge. Conventional semi-supervised methods also suffer from the incorrect entity alignment in newly proposed training data. To resolve these issues, we design an iterative cycle-teaching framework for semi-supervised entity alignment. The key idea is to train multiple entity alignment models (called aligners) simultaneously and let each aligner iteratively teach its successor the proposed new entity alignment. We propose a diversity-aware alignment selection method to choose reliable entity alignment for each aligner. We also design a conflict resolution mechanism to resolve the alignment conflict when combining the new alignment of an aligner and that from its teacher. Besides, considering the influence of cycle-teaching order, we elaborately design a strategy to arrange the optimal order that can maximize the overall performance of multiple aligners. The cycle-teaching process can break the limitations of each model's learning capability and reduce the noise in new training data, leading to improved performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed cycle-teaching framework, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models when the training data is insufficient and the new entity alignment has much noise.
Entity alignment (EA) merges knowledge graphs (KGs) by identifying the equivalent entities in different graphs, which can effectively enrich knowledge representations of KGs. However, in practice, different KGs often include dangling entities whose counterparts cannot be found in the other graph, which limits the performance of EA methods. To improve EA with dangling entities, we propose an unsupervised method called Semi-constraint Optimal Transport for Entity Alignment in Dangling cases (SoTead). Our main idea is to model the entity alignment between two KGs as an optimal transport problem from one KG's entities to the others. First, we set pseudo entity pairs between KGs based on pretrained word embeddings. Then, we conduct contrastive metric learning to obtain the transport cost between each entity pair. Finally, we introduce a virtual entity for each KG to "align" the dangling entities from the other KGs, which relaxes the optimization constraints and leads to a semi-constraint optimal transport. In the experimental part, we first show the superiority of SoTead on a commonly-used entity alignment dataset. Besides, to analyze the ability for dangling entity detection with other baselines, we construct a medical cross-lingual knowledge graph dataset, MedED, where our SoTead also reaches state-of-the-art performance.