Time-aware Entity Alignment using Temporal Relational Attention

Knowledge graph (KG) alignment is to match entities in different KGs, which is important to knowledge fusion and integration. Temporal KGs (TKGs) extend traditional Knowledge Graphs (KGs) by associating static triples with specific timestamps (e.g., temporal scopes or time points). Moreover, open-world KGs (OKGs) are dynamic with new emerging entities and timestamps. While entity alignment (EA) between KGs has drawn increasing attention from the research community, EA between TKGs and OKGs still remains unexplored. In this work, we propose a novel Temporal Relational Entity Alignment method (TREA) which is able to learn alignment-oriented TKG embeddings and represent new emerging entities. We first map entities, relations and timestamps into an embedding space, and the initial feature of each entity is represented by fusing the embeddings of its connected relations and timestamps as well as its neighboring entities. A graph neural network (GNN) is employed to capture intra-graph information and a temporal relational attention mechanism is utilized to integrate relation and time features of links between nodes. Finally, a margin-based full multi-class log-loss is used for efficient training and a sequential time regularizer is used to model unobserved timestamps. We use three well-established TKG datasets, as references for evaluating temporal and non-temporal EA methods. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art EA methods.