Probabilistic Coarsening for Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Abstract

Knowledge graphs have risen in popularity in recent years, demonstrating their utility in applications across the spectrum of computer science. Finding their embedded representations is thus highly desirable as it makes them easily operated on and reasoned with by machines. With this in mind, we propose a simple meta-strategy for embedding knowledge graphs using probabilistic coarsening. In this approach, a knowledge graph is first coarsened before being embedded by an arbitrary embedding method. The resulting coarse embeddings are then extended down as those of the initial knowledge graph. Although straightforward, this allows for faster training by reducing knowledge graph complexity while revealing its higher-order structures. We demonstrate this empirically on four real-world datasets, which show that coarse embeddings are learned faster and are often of higher quality. We conclude that coarsening is a recommended prepossessing step regardless of the underlying embedding method used.