Zifeng Ding


2024

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Temporal Fact Reasoning over Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs
Zifeng Ding | Jingcheng Wu | Jingpei Wu | Yan Xia | Bo Xiong | Volker Tresp
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Stemming from traditional knowledge graphs (KGs), hyper-relational KGs (HKGs) provide additional key-value pairs (i.e., qualifiers) for each KG fact that help to better restrict the fact validity. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in studying graph reasoning over HKGs. Meanwhile, as discussed in recent works that focus on temporal KGs (TKGs), world knowledge is ever-evolving, making it important to reason over temporal facts in KGs. Previous mainstream benchmark HKGs do not explicitly specify temporal information for each HKG fact. Therefore, almost all existing HKG reasoning approaches do not devise any module specifically for temporal reasoning. To better study temporal fact reasoning over HKGs, we propose a new type of data structure named hyper-relational TKG (HTKG). Every fact in an HTKG is coupled with a timestamp explicitly indicating its time validity. We develop two new benchmark HTKG datasets, i.e., Wiki-hy and YAGO-hy, and propose an HTKG reasoning model that efficiently models hyper-relational temporal facts. To support future research on this topic, we open-source our datasets and model.

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zrLLM: Zero-Shot Relational Learning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models
Zifeng Ding | Heling Cai | Jingpei Wu | Yunpu Ma | Ruotong Liao | Bo Xiong | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Modeling evolving knowledge over temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) has become a heated topic. Various methods have been proposed to forecast links on TKGs. Most of them are embedding-based, where hidden representations are learned to represent knowledge graph (KG) entities and relations based on the observed graph contexts. Although these methods show strong performance on traditional TKG forecasting (TKGF) benchmarks, they face a strong challenge in modeling the unseen zero-shot relations that have no prior graph context. In this paper, we try to mitigate this problem as follows. We first input the text descriptions of KG relations into large language models (LLMs) for generating relation representations, and then introduce them into embedding-based TKGF methods. LLM-empowered representations can capture the semantic information in the relation descriptions. This makes the relations, whether seen or unseen, with similar semantic meanings stay close in the embedding space, enabling TKGF models to recognize zero-shot relations even without any observed graph context. Experimental results show that our approach helps TKGF models to achieve much better performance in forecasting the facts with previously unseen relations, while still maintaining their ability in link forecasting regarding seen relations.

2023

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ECOLA: Enhancing Temporal Knowledge Embeddings with Contextualized Language Representations
Zhen Han | Ruotong Liao | Jindong Gu | Yao Zhang | Zifeng Ding | Yujia Gu | Heinz Koeppl | Hinrich Schütze | Volker Tresp
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Since conventional knowledge embedding models cannot take full advantage of the abundant textual information, there have been extensive research efforts in enhancing knowledge embedding using texts. However, existing enhancement approaches cannot apply to temporal knowledge graphs (tKGs), which contain time-dependent event knowledge with complex temporal dynamics. Specifically, existing enhancement approaches often assume knowledge embedding is time-independent. In contrast, the entity embedding in tKG models usually evolves, which poses the challenge of aligning temporally relevant texts with entities. To this end, we propose to study enhancing temporal knowledge embedding with textual data in this paper. As an approach to this task, we propose Enhanced Temporal Knowledge Embeddings with Contextualized Language Representations (ECOLA), which takes the temporal aspect into account and injects textual information into temporal knowledge embedding. To evaluate ECOLA, we introduce three new datasets for training and evaluating ECOLA. Extensive experiments show that ECOLA significantly enhances temporal KG embedding models with up to 287% relative improvements regarding Hits@1 on the link prediction task. The code and models are publicly available on https://github.com/mayhugotong/ECOLA.

2022

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TempCaps: A Capsule Network-based Embedding Model for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
Guirong Fu | Zhao Meng | Zhen Han | Zifeng Ding | Yunpu Ma | Matthias Schubert | Volker Tresp | Roger Wattenhofer
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP

Temporal knowledge graphs store the dynamics of entities and relations during a time period. However, typical temporal knowledge graphs often suffer from incomplete dynamics with missing facts in real-world scenarios. Hence, modeling temporal knowledge graphs to complete the missing facts is important. In this paper, we tackle the temporal knowledge graph completion task by proposing TempCaps, which is a Capsule network-based embedding model for Temporal knowledge graph completion. TempCaps models temporal knowledge graphs by introducing a novel dynamic routing aggregator inspired by Capsule Networks. Specifically, TempCaps builds entity embeddings by dynamically routing retrieved temporal relation and neighbor information. Experimental results demonstrate that TempCaps reaches state-of-the-art performance for temporal knowledge graph completion. Additional analysis also shows that TempCaps is efficient.

2021

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Learning Neural Ordinary Equations for Forecasting Future Links on Temporal Knowledge Graphs
Zhen Han | Zifeng Ding | Yunpu Ma | Yujia Gu | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

There has been an increasing interest in inferring future links on temporal knowledge graphs (KG). While links on temporal KGs vary continuously over time, the existing approaches model the temporal KGs in discrete state spaces. To this end, we propose a novel continuum model by extending the idea of neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to multi-relational graph convolutional networks. The proposed model preserves the continuous nature of dynamic multi-relational graph data and encodes both temporal and structural information into continuous-time dynamic embeddings. In addition, a novel graph transition layer is applied to capture the transitions on the dynamic graph, i.e., edge formation and dissolution. We perform extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets for temporal KG reasoning, showing our model’s superior performance on the future link forecasting task.