A study on temporal knowledge graph enrichment

Abstract

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.