Wen Hua

Kexuan Xin, Zequn Sun, Wen Hua et al.

Entity alignment is to find identical entities in different knowledge graphs. Although embedding-based entity alignment has recently achieved remarkable progress, training data insufficiency remains a critical challenge. Conventional semi-supervised methods also suffer from the incorrect entity alignment in newly proposed training data. To resolve these issues, we design an iterative cycle-teaching framework for semi-supervised entity alignment. The key idea is to train multiple entity alignment models (called aligners) simultaneously and let each aligner iteratively teach its successor the proposed new entity alignment. We propose a diversity-aware alignment selection method to choose reliable entity alignment for each aligner. We also design a conflict resolution mechanism to resolve the alignment conflict when combining the new alignment of an aligner and that from its teacher. Besides, considering the influence of cycle-teaching order, we elaborately design a strategy to arrange the optimal order that can maximize the overall performance of multiple aligners. The cycle-teaching process can break the limitations of each model's learning capability and reduce the noise in new training data, leading to improved performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed cycle-teaching framework, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models when the training data is insufficient and the new entity alignment has much noise.

Bing Liu, Tiancheng Lan, Wen Hua et al.

Entity Alignment (EA), which aims to detect entity mappings (i.e. equivalent entity pairs) in different Knowledge Graphs (KGs), is critical for KG fusion. Neural EA methods dominate current EA research but still suffer from their reliance on labelled mappings. To solve this problem, a few works have explored boosting the training of EA models with self-training, which adds confidently predicted mappings into the training data iteratively. Though the effectiveness of self-training can be glimpsed in some specific settings, we still have very limited knowledge about it. One reason is the existing works concentrate on devising EA models and only treat self-training as an auxiliary tool. To fill this knowledge gap, we change the perspective to self-training to shed light on it. In addition, the existing self-training strategies have limited impact because they introduce either much False Positive noise or a low quantity of True Positive pseudo mappings. To improve self-training for EA, we propose exploiting the dependencies between entities, a particularity of EA, to suppress the noise without hurting the recall of True Positive mappings. Through extensive experiments, we show that the introduction of dependency makes the self-training strategy for EA reach a new level. The value of self-training in alleviating the reliance on annotation is actually much higher than what has been realised. Furthermore, we suggest future study on smart data annotation to break the ceiling of EA performance.

Kexuan Xin, Zequn Sun, Wen Hua et al.

Entity alignment is a crucial task in knowledge graph fusion. However, most entity alignment approaches have the scalability problem. Recent methods address this issue by dividing large KGs into small blocks for embedding and alignment learning in each. However, such a partitioning and learning process results in an excessive loss of structure and alignment. Therefore, in this work, we propose a scalable GNN-based entity alignment approach to reduce the structure and alignment loss from three perspectives. First, we propose a centrality-based subgraph generation algorithm to recall some landmark entities serving as the bridges between different subgraphs. Second, we introduce self-supervised entity reconstruction to recover entity representations from incomplete neighborhood subgraphs, and design cross-subgraph negative sampling to incorporate entities from other subgraphs in alignment learning. Third, during the inference process, we merge the embeddings of subgraphs to make a single space for alignment search. Experimental results on the benchmark OpenEA dataset and the proposed large DBpedia1M dataset verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Bing Liu, Harrisen Scells, Wen Hua et al.

Entity Alignment (EA) aims to find equivalent entities between two Knowledge Graphs (KGs). While numerous neural EA models have been devised, they are mainly learned using labelled data only. In this work, we argue that different entities within one KG should have compatible counterparts in the other KG due to the potential dependencies among the entities. Making compatible predictions thus should be one of the goals of training an EA model along with fitting the labelled data: this aspect however is neglected in current methods. To power neural EA models with compatibility, we devise a training framework by addressing three problems: (1) how to measure the compatibility of an EA model; (2) how to inject the property of being compatible into an EA model; (3) how to optimise parameters of the compatibility model. Extensive experiments on widely-used datasets demonstrate the advantages of integrating compatibility within EA models. In fact, state-of-the-art neural EA models trained within our framework using just 5\% of the labelled data can achieve comparable effectiveness with supervised training using 20\% of the labelled data.

Bing Liu, Wen Hua, Guido Zuccon et al.

Entity Alignment (EA) aims to match equivalent entities that refer to the same real-world objects and is a key step for Knowledge Graph (KG) fusion. Most neural EA models cannot be applied to large-scale real-life KGs due to their excessive consumption of GPU memory and time. One promising solution is to divide a large EA task into several subtasks such that each subtask only needs to match two small subgraphs of the original KGs. However, it is challenging to divide the EA task without losing effectiveness. Existing methods display low coverage of potential mappings, insufficient evidence in context graphs, and largely differing subtask sizes. In this work, we design the DivEA framework for large-scale EA with high-quality task division. To include in the EA subtasks a high proportion of the potential mappings originally present in the large EA task, we devise a counterpart discovery method that exploits the locality principle of the EA task and the power of trained EA models. Unique to our counterpart discovery method is the explicit modelling of the chance of a potential mapping. We also introduce an evidence passing mechanism to quantify the informativeness of context entities and find the most informative context graphs with flexible control of the subtask size. Extensive experiments show that DivEA achieves higher EA performance than alternative state-of-the-art solutions.

Jiayun Li, Wen Hua, Shiqi Fan et al.

Temporal Entity Alignment (TEA), which aims to identify equivalent entities across Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs), is crucial for integrating knowledge facts from multiple sources. However, existing TEA models often fail to capture the orthogonal yet complementary effects between structural and temporal features, and typically overlook the importance of information richness, a key factor for effective message passing in neural feature encoders. To address these limitations, we propose the RCTEA framework, which jointly models both structural and temporal aspects of TKGs for entity alignment. Specifically, we design a richness-guided attention mechanism along with an adaptive weighting strategy to facilitate effective feature fusion. To ensure robust alignment despite noisy entity contexts, we introduce a dual-view neighborhood consensus algorithm that jointly refines the feature encoders to enforce local structural consistency of the predicted alignments. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of RCTEA, achieving state-of-the-art performance on public TEA benchmarks.

Shiqi Fan, Quanming Yao, Hongyi Nie et al.

Temporal knowledge graph reasoning (TKGR) aims to predict future events by inferring missing entities with dynamic knowledge structures. Existing LLM-based reasoning methods prioritize contextual over structural relations, struggling to extract relevant subgraphs from dynamic graphs. This limits structural information understanding, leading to unstructured, hallucination-prone inferences especially with temporal inconsistencies. To address this problem, we propose IGETR (Integration of Graph and Editing-enhanced Temporal Reasoning), a hybrid reasoning framework that combines the structured temporal modeling capabilities of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with the contextual understanding of LLMs. IGETR operates through a three-stage pipeline. The first stage aims to ground the reasoning process in the actual data by identifying structurally and temporally coherent candidate paths through a temporal GNN, ensuring that inference starts from reliable graph-based evidence. The second stage introduces LLM-guided path editing to address logical and semantic inconsistencies, leveraging external knowledge to refine and enhance the initial paths. The final stage focuses on integrating the refined reasoning paths to produce predictions that are both accurate and interpretable. Experiments on standard TKG benchmarks show that IGETR achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines with relative improvements of up to 5.6% on Hits@1 and 8.1% on Hits@3 on the challenging ICEWS datasets. Additionally, we execute ablation studies and additional analyses confirm the effectiveness of each component.

Achmad Ginanjar, Xue Li, Wen Hua et al.

Learning from vertical partitioned data silos is challenging due to the segmented nature of data, sample misalignment, and strict privacy concerns. Federated learning has been proposed as a solution. However, sample misalignment across silos often hinders optimal model performance and suggests data sharing within the model, which breaks privacy. Our proposed solution is Contrastive Federated Learning with Tabular Data Silos (CFL), which offers a solution for data silos with sample misalignment without the need for sharing original or representative data to maintain privacy. CFL begins with local acquisition of contrastive representations of the data within each silo and aggregates knowledge from other silos through the federated learning algorithm. Our experiments demonstrate that CFL solves the limitations of existing algorithms for data silos and outperforms existing tabular contrastive learning. CFL provides performance improvements without loosening privacy.

Jiaan Wang, Jianfeng Qu, Kexin Wang et al.

Knowledge-grounded dialogue (KGD) learns to generate an informative response based on a given dialogue context and external knowledge (\emph{e.g.}, knowledge graphs; KGs). Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and pre-training techniques has brought great success to knowledge-grounded dialogue. However, when building KGD systems in real applications, there are various real-world noises that are inevitable to face. For example, the dialogue context might involve perturbations such as misspellings and abbreviations. In addition, KGs typically suffer from incompletion and also might contain erroneous and outdated facts. Such real-world noises pose a challenge to the robustness of KGD systems and hinder their applications in the real world. In this paper, we propose an entity-based contrastive learning framework for improving the robustness of KGD. Specifically, we make use of the entity information in a KGD sample to create both its positive and negative samples which involve semantic-irrelevant and semantic-relevant perturbations, respectively. The contrastive learning framework ensures the KGD model is aware of these two types of perturbations, thus generating informative responses with the potentially noisy inputs in real applications. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance in terms of automatic evaluation scores, verifying its effectiveness and potentiality. Furthermore, we show that our method can generate better responses than comparison models in both the noisy and the few-shot settings.

Achmad Ginanjar, Xue Li, Priyanka Singh et al.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) prediction remains a significant challenge in machine learning, particularly for tabular data where traditional methods often fail to generalize beyond their training distribution. This paper introduces Tabular Continual Contrastive Learning (TCCL), a novel framework designed to address OOD challenges in tabular data processing. TCCL integrates contrastive learning principles with continual learning mechanisms, featuring a three-component architecture: an Encoder for data transformation, a Decoder for representation learning, and a Learner Head. We evaluate TCCL against 14 baseline models, including state-of-the-art deep learning approaches and gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT), across eight diverse tabular datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that TCCL consistently outperforms existing methods in both classification and regression tasks on OOD data, with particular strength in handling distribution shifts. These findings suggest that TCCL represents a significant advancement in handling OOD scenarios for tabular data.

Achmad Ginanjar, Xue Li, Priyanka Singh et al.

The open-world assumption in model development suggests that a model might lack sufficient information to adequately handle data that is entirely distinct or out of distribution (OOD). While deep learning methods have shown promising results in handling OOD data through generalization techniques, they often require specialized hardware that may not be accessible to all users. We present TCL, a lightweight yet effective solution that operates efficiently on standard CPU hardware. Our approach adapts contrastive learning principles specifically for tabular data structures, incorporating full matrix augmentation and simplified loss calculation. Through comprehensive experiments across 10 diverse datasets, we demonstrate that TCL outperforms existing models, including FT-Transformer and ResNet, particularly in classification tasks, while maintaining competitive performance in regression problems. TCL achieves these results with significantly reduced computational requirements, making it accessible to users with limited hardware capabilities. This study also provides practical guidance for detecting and evaluating OOD data through straightforward experiments and visualizations. Our findings show that TCL offers a promising balance between performance and efficiency in handling OOD prediction tasks, which is particularly beneficial for general machine learning practitioners working with computational constraints.

Khai Phan Tran, Wen Hua, Xue Li

Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) aims to identify relationships between entity pairs within a document. However, most existing methods assume a uniform label distribution, resulting in suboptimal performance on real-world, imbalanced datasets. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel data augmentation approach using generative models to enhance data from the embedding space. Our method leverages the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) architecture to capture all relation-wise distributions formed by entity pair representations and augment data for underrepresented relations. To better capture the multi-label nature of DocRE, we parameterize the VAE's latent space with a Diffusion Model. Additionally, we introduce a hierarchical training framework to integrate the proposed VAE-based augmentation module into DocRE systems. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models, effectively addressing the long-tail distribution problem in DocRE.

Kexuan Xin, Zequn Sun, Wen Hua et al.

Entity alignment is a crucial step in integrating knowledge graphs (KGs) from multiple sources. Previous attempts at entity alignment have explored different KG structures, such as neighborhood-based and path-based contexts, to learn entity embeddings, but they are limited in capturing the multi-context features. Moreover, most approaches directly utilize the embedding similarity to determine entity alignment without considering the global interaction among entities and relations. In this work, we propose an Informed Multi-context Entity Alignment (IMEA) model to address these issues. In particular, we introduce Transformer to flexibly capture the relation, path, and neighborhood contexts, and design holistic reasoning to estimate alignment probabilities based on both embedding similarity and the relation/entity functionality. The alignment evidence obtained from holistic reasoning is further injected back into the Transformer via the proposed soft label editing to inform embedding learning. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our IMEA model compared with existing state-of-the-art entity alignment methods.

Bing Liu, Harrisen Scells, Guido Zuccon et al.

Entity Alignment (EA) aims to match equivalent entities across different Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and is an essential step of KG fusion. Current mainstream methods -- neural EA models -- rely on training with seed alignment, i.e., a set of pre-aligned entity pairs which are very costly to annotate. In this paper, we devise a novel Active Learning (AL) framework for neural EA, aiming to create highly informative seed alignment to obtain more effective EA models with less annotation cost. Our framework tackles two main challenges encountered when applying AL to EA: (1) How to exploit dependencies between entities within the AL strategy. Most AL strategies assume that the data instances to sample are independent and identically distributed. However, entities in KGs are related. To address this challenge, we propose a structure-aware uncertainty sampling strategy that can measure the uncertainty of each entity as well as its impact on its neighbour entities in the KG. (2) How to recognise entities that appear in one KG but not in the other KG (i.e., bachelors). Identifying bachelors would likely save annotation budget. To address this challenge, we devise a bachelor recognizer paying attention to alleviate the effect of sampling bias. Empirical results show that our proposed AL strategy can significantly improve sampling quality with good generality across different datasets, EA models and amount of bachelors.

Sana Rahmani, Saeid Hosseini, Raziyeh Zall et al.

Multimodal sentiment analysis benefits various applications such as human-computer interaction and recommendation systems. It aims to infer the users' bipolar ideas using visual, textual, and acoustic signals. Although researchers affirm the association between cognitive cues and emotional manifestations, most of the current multimodal approaches in sentiment analysis disregard user-specific aspects. To tackle this issue, we devise a novel method to perform multimodal sentiment prediction using cognitive cues, such as personality. Our framework constructs an adaptive tree by hierarchically dividing users and trains the LSTM-based submodels, utilizing an attention-based fusion to transfer cognitive-oriented knowledge within the tree. Subsequently, the framework consumes the conclusive agglomerative knowledge from the adaptive tree to predict final sentiments. We also devise a dynamic dropout method to facilitate data sharing between neighboring nodes, reducing data sparsity. The empirical results on real-world datasets determine that our proposed model for sentiment prediction can surpass trending rivals. Moreover, compared to other ensemble approaches, the proposed transfer-based algorithm can better utilize the latent cognitive cues and foster the prediction outcomes. Based on the given extrinsic and intrinsic analysis results, we note that compared to other theoretical-based techniques, the proposed hierarchical clustering approach can better group the users within the adaptive tree.

Sayna Esmailzadeh, Saeid Hosseini, Mohammad Reza Kangavari et al.

Leveraging short-text contents to estimate the occupation of microblog authors has significant gains in many applications. Yet challenges abound. Firstly brief textual contents come with excessive lexical noise that makes the inference problem challenging. Secondly, cognitive-semantics are not evident, and important linguistic features are latent in short-text contents. Thirdly, it is hard to measure the correlation between the cognitive short-text semantics and the features pertaining various occupations. We argue that the multi-aspect cognitive features are needed to correctly associate short-text contents to a particular job and discover suitable people for the careers. To this end, we devise a novel framework that on the one hand, can infer short-text contents and exploit cognitive features, and on the other hand, fuses various adopted novel algorithms, such as curve fitting, support vector, and boosting modules to better predict the occupation of the authors. The final estimation module manufactures the $R^w$-tree via coherence weight to tune the best outcome in the inferring process. We conduct comprehensive experiments on real-life Twitter data. The experimental results show that compared to other rivals, our cognitive multi-aspect model can achieve a higher performance in the career estimation procedure, where it is inevitable to neglect the contextual semantics of users.

Sara Kamran, Raziyeh Zall, Mohammad Reza Kangavari et al.

The latent knowledge in the emotions and the opinions of the individuals that are manifested via social networks are crucial to numerous applications including social management, dynamical processes, and public security. Affective computing, as an interdisciplinary research field, linking artificial intelligence to cognitive inference, is capable to exploit emotion-oriented knowledge from brief contents. The textual contents convey hidden information such as personality and cognition about corresponding authors that can determine both correlations and variations between users. Emotion recognition from brief contents should embrace the contrast between authors where the differences in personality and cognition can be traced within emotional expressions. To tackle this challenge, we devise a framework that, on the one hand, infers latent individual aspects, from brief contents and, on the other hand, presents a novel ensemble classifier equipped with dynamic dropout convnets to extract emotions from textual context. To categorize short text contents, our proposed method conjointly leverages cognitive factors and exploits hidden information. We utilize the outcome vectors in a novel embedding model to foster emotion-pertinent features that are collectively assembled by lexicon inductions. Experimental results show that compared to other competitors, our proposed model can achieve a higher performance in recognizing emotion from noisy contents.

Saeed Najafipour, Saeid Hosseini, Wen Hua et al.

Linking authors of short-text contents has important usages in many applications, including Named Entity Recognition (NER) and human community detection. However, certain challenges lie ahead. Firstly, the input short-text contents are noisy, ambiguous, and do not follow the grammatical rules. Secondly, traditional text mining methods fail to effectively extract concepts through words and phrases. Thirdly, the textual contents are temporally skewed, which can affect the semantic understanding by multiple time facets. Finally, using the complementary knowledge-bases makes the results biased to the content of the external database and deviates the understanding and interpretation away from the real nature of the given short text corpus. To overcome these challenges, we devise a neural network-based temporal-textual framework that generates the tightly connected author subgraphs from microblog short-text contents. Our approach, on the one hand, computes the relevance score (edge weight) between the authors through considering a portmanteau of contents and concepts, and on the other hand, employs a stack-wise graph cutting algorithm to extract the communities of the related authors. Experimental results show that compared to other knowledge-centered competitors, our multi-aspect vector space model can achieve a higher performance in linking short-text authors. Additionally, given the author linking task, the more comprehensive the dataset is, the higher the significance of the extracted concepts will be.