DTransE: Distributed Translating Embedding for Knowledge Graph

Abstract

Knowledge graphs play an important role in many applications, such as link prediction and question answering. Translating embedding for knowledge graphs is done with the aim of encoding structured information on entities and their rich relations in a low-dimensional embedding space. TransE is one of the most important methods in translation-based models, and uses translation invariance to implement translating embedding for knowledge graphs. In this line of work, translating embedding models represent the relation as a translation from the head entity to the tail entity and have achieved impressive results. Currently, the TransE model is only developed on single-node machines. Unfortunately, the computing and storage capacities of a single machine can easily reach their limits as knowledge graphs become larger and more complex, which limits the application scope of TransE. In order to solve this problem, we propose a distributed TransE method, known as DTransE, which can utilize distributed computing resources to calculate knowledge graph embeddings. However, building a distributed TransE is complicated and involves challenges of knowledge graph partitioning and computation. To solve these challenges, we provide a high-quality edge partitioning algorithm for the power-law graph by considering the high-degree and low-degree vertices with adaptive weights, which can balance the workload. By using the unactivated Gather-Apply-Scatter model on TransE, the processes periodically exchange messages in a loop. The irregular data distribution among the processes is also optimized to further accelerate communication. As far as we know, this is the first work on a distributed TransE method. We use link prediction to evaluate the DTransE in a distributed environment. Experiments show that, compared to the original TransE method, our proposed DTransE is, on average, 24.5 times faster with a minimum loss of accuracy; compared to the state-of-the-art parallel TransE implementation, DTransE is two times faster on average.