Learning to Walk across Time for Interpretable Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion

Abstract

© 2021 ACM.Static knowledge graphs (KGs), despite their wide usage in relational reasoning and downstream tasks, fall short of realistic modeling of knowledge and facts that are only temporarily valid. Compared to static knowledge graphs, temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) inherently reflect the transient nature of real-world knowledge. Naturally, automatic TKG completion has drawn much research interests for a more realistic modeling of relational reasoning. However, most of the existing models for TKG completion extend static KG embeddings that do not fully exploit TKG structure, thus lacking in 1) accounting for temporally relevant events already residing in the local neighborhood of a query, and 2) path-based inference that facilitates multi-hop reasoning and better interpretability. In this paper, we propose T-GAP, a novel model for TKG completion that maximally utilizes both temporal information and graph structure in its encoder and decoder. T-GAP encodes query-specific substructure of TKG by focusing on the temporal displacement between each event and the query timestamp, and performs path-based inference by propagating attention through the graph. Our empirical experiments demonstrate that T-GAP not only achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art baselines, but also competently generalizes to queries with unseen timestamps. Through extensive qualitative analyses, we also show that T-GAP enjoys transparent interpretability, and follows human intuition in its reasoning process.