From Chain to Tree: Refining Chain-like Rules into Tree-like Rules on Knowledge Graphs

Wangtao Sun, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu


Abstract
With good explainability and controllability, rule-based methods play an important role in the task of Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC). However, existing studies primarily focused on learning chain-like rules, whose chain-like structure limits their expressive power. Consequently, chain-like rules often exhibit lower Standard Confidence, and are prone to the incorrect grounding values during reasoning, thus producing erroneous reasoning results. In this paper, we propose the concept of tree-like rules on knowledge graphs to expand the scope of the application and improve the reasoning ability of rule-based methods. To achieve this, we formalize the problem of tree-like rule refinement and propose an effective framework for refining chain-like rules into tree-like rules. Experimental evaluations on four public datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework can seamlessly adapt to various chain-like rule induction methods and the refined tree-like rules consistently exhibit higher Standard Confidence and achieve better performances than the original chain-like rules on link prediction tasks. Furthermore, we illustrate that the improvements brought by tree-like rules are positively correlated with the density of the knowledge graphs. The data and code of this paper can be available at https://github.com/forangel2014/tree-rule.
Anthology ID:
2025.neusymbridge-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of Bridging Neurons and Symbols for Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Graphs Reasoning @ COLING 2025
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Kang Liu, Yangqiu Song, Zhen Han, Rafet Sifa, Shizhu He, Yunfei Long
Venues:
NeusymBridge | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
31–39
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.neusymbridge-1.4/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wangtao Sun, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, and Kang Liu. 2025. From Chain to Tree: Refining Chain-like Rules into Tree-like Rules on Knowledge Graphs. In Proceedings of Bridging Neurons and Symbols for Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Graphs Reasoning @ COLING 2025, pages 31–39, Abu Dhabi, UAE. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
From Chain to Tree: Refining Chain-like Rules into Tree-like Rules on Knowledge Graphs (Sun et al., NeusymBridge 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.neusymbridge-1.4.pdf