LightEA: A Scalable, Robust, and Interpretable Entity Alignment Framework via Three-view Label Propagation
Xin Mao, Wenting Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Man Lan
Abstract
Entity Alignment (EA) aims to find equivalent entity pairs between KGs, which is the core step to bridging and integrating multi-source KGs. In this paper, we argue that existing complex EA methods inevitably inherit the inborn defects from their neural network lineage: poor interpretability and weak scalability. Inspired by recent studies, we reinvent the classical Label Propagation algorithm to effectively run on KGs and propose a neural-free EA framework — LightEA, consisting of three efficient components: (i) Random Orthogonal Label Generation, (ii) Three-view Label Propagation, and (iii) Sparse Sinkhorn Operation.According to the extensive experiments on public datasets, LightEA has impressive scalability, robustness, and interpretability. With a mere tenth of time consumption, LightEA achieves comparable results to state-of-the-art methods across all datasets and even surpasses them on many. Besides, due to the computational process of LightEA being entirely linear, we could trace the propagation process at each step and clearly explain how the entities are aligned.
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Cited by top-tier papers5
- ZeroEA: A Zero-Training Entity Alignment Framework via Pre-Trained Language ModelNan Huo, Reynold Cheng, Ben Kao, Wentao Ning et al.VLDB 2024 · 16 citations
- Lambda: Learning Matchable Prior For Entity Alignment with Unlabeled Dangling CasesHang Yin, Liyao Xiang, Dong Ding, Yuheng He et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 7 citations
- Aligning Multiple Knowledge Graphs in A Single PassYaming Yang, Zhe Wang, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao et al.WWW 2026 · 5 citations
- NeuSymEA: Neuro-symbolic Entity Alignment via Variational InferenceShengyuan Chen, Zheng Yuan, Qinggang Zhang, Wen Hua et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 2 citations
- Graph Embeddings Meet Link Keys Discovery for Entity MatchingChloé Khadija Jradeh, Ensiyeh Raoufi, Jérôme David, Pierre Larmande et al.WWW 2025 · 1 citation
Builds on13
- Combining Label Propagation and Simple Models out-performs Graph Neural NetworksQian Huang, Horace He, Abhay Singh, Ser-Nam Lim et al.ICLR 2021 · 322 citations
- A Benchmarking Study of Embedding-based Entity Alignment for Knowledge GraphsZequn Sun, Qingheng Zhang, Wei Hu, Chengming Wang et al.VLDB 2020 · 297 citations
- Deep Graph Matching ConsensusMatthias Fey, Jan Eric Lenssen, Christopher Morris, Jonathan Masci et al.ICLR 2020 · 227 citations
- Boosting the Speed of Entity Alignment 10 ×: Dual Attention Matching Network with Normalized Hard Sample MiningXin Mao, Wenting Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Man LanWWW 2021 · 148 citations
- Neighborhood Matching Network for Entity AlignmentYuting Wu, Xiao Liu, Yansong Feng, Zheng Wang et al.ACL 2020 · 122 citations
Related papers
- From Alignment to Assignment: Frustratingly Simple Unsupervised Entity AlignmentXin Mao, Wenting Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Man LanEMNLP 2021 · 59 citations
- Guiding Neural Entity Alignment with CompatibilityBing Liu, Harrisen Scells, Wen Hua, Guido Zuccon et al.EMNLP 2022 · 6 citations
- Enhancing Large-Scale Entity Alignment with Critical Structure and High-Quality ContextQian Zhou, Wei Chen, Li Zhang, Pengpeng Zhao et al.ICDE 2025 · 1 citation
- An Effective and Efficient Entity Alignment Decoding Algorithm via Third-Order Tensor IsomorphismXin Mao, Meirong Ma, Hao Yuan, Jianchao Zhu et al.ACL 2022 · 30 citations
- Knowledge Graph Alignment with Entity-Pair EmbeddingZhichun Wang, Jinjian Yang, Xiaoju YeEMNLP 2020 · 52 citations
