Predicate Importance Estimation and Decoupled Rationale-Score Distillation for Entity Alignment

Keunha Kim, Yoonjin Jang, Hyeon-gu Lee, Sihyung Kim, Youngjoong Ko


Abstract
Knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly used as structured context for Large Language Models (LLMs), but industrial KG-RAG systems often need to integrate public and domain-specific KGs constructed from heterogeneous databases. This integration relies on Entity Alignment (EA), where lexical matching alone is insufficient under predicate-name variation and incomplete local neighborhoods. We address EA for KG integration by constructing a pairwise EA dataset and proposing two complementary modules: Predicate Importance Estimation (PIE) and Decoupled Rationale-Score Distillation (DRSD). PIE is a compact embedding-based approach that removes the subject information from each 1-hop triple, encodes the resulting subjectless triples, and aggregates them with learnable predicate-importance weights to build predicate-aware entity embeddings. DRSD trains a distilled small language model (SLM) with pseudo-answers produced by a teacher LLM through distinct prompts. By converting binary EA labels into text-based supervision and decoupling confidence-score estimation from label-consistent rationales, DRSD enables the SLM to learn task-specific reasoning while retaining a less label-biased confidence signal. Experiments show that PIE and DRSD improve EA classification. Moreover, because DRSD decouples confidence-score estimation from the decision, a division between the two flags an uncertain prediction for human review, thereby enabling a practical discrepancy between automatic acceptance and human-in-the-loop verification.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-industry.213
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Pepa Atanasova, Gholamreza Haffari, Minghan Wang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3570–3587
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-industry.213/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Keunha Kim, Yoonjin Jang, Hyeon-gu Lee, Sihyung Kim, and Youngjoong Ko. 2026. Predicate Importance Estimation and Decoupled Rationale-Score Distillation for Entity Alignment. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 3570–3587, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Predicate Importance Estimation and Decoupled Rationale-Score Distillation for Entity Alignment (Kim et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-industry.213.pdf