Graph Attention Networks over Edge Content-Based Channels

Edges play a crucial role in passing information on a graph, especially when they carry textual content reflecting semantics behind how nodes are linked and interacting with each other. In this paper, we propose a channel-aware attention mechanism enabled by edge text content when aggregating information from neighboring nodes; and we realize this mechanism in a graph autoencoder framework. Edge text content is encoded as low-dimensional mixtures of latent topics, which serve as semantic channels for topic-level information passing on edges. We embed nodes and topics in the same latent space to capture their mutual dependency when decoding the structural and textual information on graph. We evaluated the proposed model on Yelp user-item bipartite graph and StackOverflow user-user interaction graph. The proposed model outperformed a set of baselines on link prediction and content prediction tasks. Qualitative evaluations also demonstrated the descriptive power of the learnt node embeddings, showing its potential as an interpretable representation of graphs.