Inductive Link Prediction in N-ary Knowledge Graphs

Jiyao Wei, Saiping Guan, Xiaolong Jin, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng


Abstract
N-ary Knowledge Graphs (NKGs), where a fact can involve more than two entities, have gained increasing attention. Link Prediction in NKGs (LPN) aims to predict missing elements in facts to facilitate the completion of NKGs. Current LPN methods implicitly operate under a closed-world assumption, meaning that the sets of entities and roles are fixed. These methods focus on predicting missing elements within facts composed of entities and roles seen during training. However, in reality, new facts involving unseen entities and roles frequently emerge, requiring completing these facts. Thus, this paper proposes a new task, Inductive Link Prediction in NKGs (ILPN), which aims to predict missing elements in facts involving unseen entities and roles in emerging NKGs. To address this task, we propose a Meta-learning-based N-ary knowledge Inductive Reasoner (MetaNIR), which employs a graph neural network with meta-learning mechanisms to embed unseen entities and roles adaptively. The obtained embeddings are used to predict missing elements in facts involving unseen elements. Since no existing dataset supports this task, three datasets are constructed to evaluate the effectiveness of MetaNIR. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MetaNIR consistently outperforms representative models across all datasets.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.595
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8885–8896
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.595/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiyao Wei, Saiping Guan, Xiaolong Jin, Jiafeng Guo, and Xueqi Cheng. 2025. Inductive Link Prediction in N-ary Knowledge Graphs. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8885–8896, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Inductive Link Prediction in N-ary Knowledge Graphs (Wei et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.595.pdf