Incorporating Literals into Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Abstract

Knowledge graphs are composed of different elements: entity nodes, relation edges, and literal nodes. Each literal node contains an entity’s attribute value (e.g. the height of an entity of type person) and thereby encodes information which in general cannot be represented by relations between entities alone. However, most of the existing embedding- or latent-feature-based methods for knowledge graph analysis only consider entity nodes and relation edges, and thus do not take the information provided by literals into account. In this paper, we extend existing latent feature methods for link prediction by a simple portable module for incorporating literals, which we name LiteralE. Unlike in concurrent methods where literals are incorporated by adding a literal-dependent term to the output of the scoring function and thus only indirectly affect the entity embeddings, LiteralE directly enriches these embeddings with information from literals via a learnable parametrized function. This function can be easily integrated into the scoring function of existing methods and learned along with the entity embeddings in an end-to-end manner. In an extensive empirical study over three datasets, we evaluate LiteralE-extended versions of various state-of-the-art latent feature methods for link prediction and demonstrate that LiteralE presents an effective way to improve their performance. For these experiments, we augmented standard datasets with their literals, which we publicly provide as testbeds for further research. Moreover, we show that LiteralE leads to an qualitative improvement of the embeddings and that it can be easily extended to handle literals from different modalities.