TimeTraveler: Reinforcement Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting

Haohai Sun, Jialun Zhong, Yunpu Ma, Zhen Han, Kun He


Abstract
Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) reasoning is a crucial task that has gained increasing research interest in recent years. Most existing methods focus on reasoning at past timestamps to complete the missing facts, and there are only a few works of reasoning on known TKGs to forecast future facts. Compared with the completion task, the forecasting task is more difficult that faces two main challenges: (1) how to effectively model the time information to handle future timestamps? (2) how to make inductive inference to handle previously unseen entities that emerge over time? To address these challenges, we propose the first reinforcement learning method for forecasting. Specifically, the agent travels on historical knowledge graph snapshots to search for the answer. Our method defines a relative time encoding function to capture the timespan information, and we design a novel time-shaped reward based on Dirichlet distribution to guide the model learning. Furthermore, we propose a novel representation method for unseen entities to improve the inductive inference ability of the model. We evaluate our method for this link prediction task at future timestamps. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate substantial performance improvement meanwhile with higher explainability, less calculation, and fewer parameters when compared with existing state-of-the-art methods.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.655
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8306–8319
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.655
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.655
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haohai Sun, Jialun Zhong, Yunpu Ma, Zhen Han, and Kun He. 2021. TimeTraveler: Reinforcement Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8306–8319, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TimeTraveler: Reinforcement Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (Sun et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.655.pdf
Software:
 2021.emnlp-main.655.Software.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.655.mp4
Code
 jhl-hust/titer
Data
ICEWS