Conformalized Answer Set Prediction for Knowledge Graph Embedding
Yuqicheng Zhu, Nico Potyka, Jiarong Pan, Bo Xiong, Yunjie He, Evgeny Kharlamov, Steffen Staab
Abstract
Knowledge graph embeddings (KGE) apply machine learning methods on knowledge graphs (KGs) to provide non-classical reasoning capabilities based on similarities and analogies. The learned KG embeddings are typically used to answer queries by ranking all potential answers, but rankings often lack a meaningful probabilistic interpretation - lower-ranked answers do not necessarily have a lower probability of being true. This limitation makes it difficult to quantify uncertainty of model’s predictions, posing challenges for the application of KGE methods in high-stakes domains like medicine. We address this issue by applying the theory of conformal prediction that allows generating answer sets, which contain the correct answer with probabilistic guarantees. We explain how conformal prediction can be used to generate such answer sets for link prediction tasks. Our empirical evaluation on four benchmark datasets using six representative KGE methods validates that the generated answer sets satisfy the probabilistic guarantees given by the theory of conformal prediction. We also demonstrate that the generated answer sets often have a sensible size and that the size adapts well with respect to the difficulty of the query.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.naacl-long.32
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- April
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Albuquerque, New Mexico
- Editors:
- Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 731–750
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.naacl-long.32/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Yuqicheng Zhu, Nico Potyka, Jiarong Pan, Bo Xiong, Yunjie He, Evgeny Kharlamov, and Steffen Staab. 2025. Conformalized Answer Set Prediction for Knowledge Graph Embedding. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 731–750, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Conformalized Answer Set Prediction for Knowledge Graph Embedding (Zhu et al., NAACL 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.naacl-long.32.pdf