Pattern Over-Generalization of Knowledge Graph Embedding

Junsik Kim, Kangil Kim


Abstract
Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) demonstrates its effectiveness for predicting missing links in knowledge graphs (KGs) by projecting entities and relations into a low-dimensional vector space. It is crucial for KGE models to effectively capture inference patterns (patterns) inherent in KGs, such as symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion and composition. Although recent KGE models exhibit strong capabilities in modeling such diverse patterns, they suffer from inherent limitations stemming from pattern over-generalization, where embeddings learned from only a single pattern instance inevitably generalize that pattern to all related instances, i.e., generalize the pattern universally. To address this issue, we propose PogRE (Pattern Over-Generalization Robust Embedding), a simple but effective method that utilizes dense linear transformations and compound operations for relation representation. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that a dense linear transformation allows a pattern to become progressively universal as more triples are observed in the pattern. Furthermore, after observing d+1 linearly independent entities (d+1 denotes the dimension of entity), the linear transformation guarantees universal generalization of the pattern across all related instances. Experimental results on three standard benchmark datasets show that PogRE outperforms existing state-of-the-art KGE models in link prediction. Moreover, our empirical results indicate that PogRE effectively addresses the negative impact of over-generalization.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.955
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
22014–22035
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.955/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Junsik Kim and Kangil Kim. 2026. Pattern Over-Generalization of Knowledge Graph Embedding. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 22014–22035, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pattern Over-Generalization of Knowledge Graph Embedding (Kim & Kim, EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.955.pdf