MixTEA: Semi-supervised Entity Alignment with Mixture Teaching
This work addresses a practical challenge in knowledge graph integration for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing pseudo-mapping approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of semi-supervised entity alignment, where labeled data is scarce, by proposing MixTEA, a method that uses mixture teaching with labeled and probabilistic pseudo mappings, resulting in superior performance on benchmark datasets.
Semi-supervised entity alignment (EA) is a practical and challenging task because of the lack of adequate labeled mappings as training data. Most works address this problem by generating pseudo mappings for unlabeled entities. However, they either suffer from the erroneous (noisy) pseudo mappings or largely ignore the uncertainty of pseudo mappings. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised EA method, termed as MixTEA, which guides the model learning with an end-to-end mixture teaching of manually labeled mappings and probabilistic pseudo mappings. We firstly train a student model using few labeled mappings as standard. More importantly, in pseudo mapping learning, we propose a bi-directional voting (BDV) strategy that fuses the alignment decisions in different directions to estimate the uncertainty via the joint matching confidence score. Meanwhile, we also design a matching diversity-based rectification (MDR) module to adjust the pseudo mapping learning, thus reducing the negative influence of noisy mappings. Extensive results on benchmark datasets as well as further analyses demonstrate the superiority and the effectiveness of our proposed method.