Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting Without Knowledge Using In-Context Learning

Dong-Ho Lee, Kian Ahrabian, Woojeong Jin, Fred Morstatter, Jay Pujara


Abstract
Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) forecasting benchmarks challenge models to predict future facts using knowledge of past facts. In this paper, we develop an approach to use in-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) for TKG forecasting. Our extensive evaluation compares diverse baselines, including both simple heuristics and state-of-the-art (SOTA) supervised models, against pre-trained LLMs across several popular benchmarks and experimental settings. We observe that naive LLMs perform on par with SOTA models, which employ carefully designed architectures and supervised training for the forecasting task, falling within the (-3.6%, +1.5%) Hits@1 margin relative to the median performance. To better understand the strengths of LLMs for forecasting, we explore different approaches for selecting historical facts, constructing prompts, controlling information propagation, and parsing outputs into a probability distribution. A surprising finding from our experiments is that LLM performance endures (±0.4% Hit@1) even when semantic information is removed by mapping entities/relations to arbitrary numbers, suggesting that prior semantic knowledge is unnecessary; rather, LLMs can leverage the symbolic patterns in the context to achieve such a strong performance. Our analysis also reveals that ICL enables LLMs to learn irregular patterns from the historical context, going beyond frequency and recency biases
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.36
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
544–557
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.36
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.36
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dong-Ho Lee, Kian Ahrabian, Woojeong Jin, Fred Morstatter, and Jay Pujara. 2023. Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting Without Knowledge Using In-Context Learning. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 544–557, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting Without Knowledge Using In-Context Learning (Lee et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.36.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.36.mp4