Extract, Define, Canonicalize: An LLM-based Framework for Knowledge Graph Construction

Bowen Zhang, Harold Soh


Abstract
In this work, we are interested in automated methods for knowledge graph creation (KGC) from input text. Progress on large language models (LLMs) has prompted a series of recent works applying them to KGC, e.g., via zero/few-shot prompting. Despite successes on small domain-specific datasets, these models face difficulties scaling up to text common in many real-world applications. A principal issue is that, in prior methods, the KG schema has to be included in the LLM prompt to generate valid triplets; larger and more complex schemas easily exceed the LLMs’ context window length. Furthermore, there are scenarios where a fixed pre-defined schema is not available and we would like the method to construct a high-quality KG with a succinct self-generated schema. To address these problems, we propose a three-phase framework named Extract-Define-Canonicalize (EDC): open information extraction followed by schema definition and post-hoc canonicalization. EDC is flexible in that it can be applied to settings where a pre-defined target schema is available and when it is not; in the latter case, it constructs a schema automatically and applies self-canonicalization. To further improve performance, we introduce a trained component that retrieves schema elements relevant to the input text; this improves the LLMs’ extraction performance in a retrieval-augmented generation-like manner. We demonstrate on three KGC benchmarks that EDC is able to extract high-quality triplets without any parameter tuning and with significantly larger schemas compared to prior works. Code for EDC is available at https://github.com/clear-nus/edc.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.548
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9820–9836
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.548
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.548
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bowen Zhang and Harold Soh. 2024. Extract, Define, Canonicalize: An LLM-based Framework for Knowledge Graph Construction. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9820–9836, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Extract, Define, Canonicalize: An LLM-based Framework for Knowledge Graph Construction (Zhang & Soh, EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.548.pdf
Software:
 2024.emnlp-main.548.software.zip