SEMMA: A Semantic Aware Knowledge Graph Foundation Model

Arvindh Arun, Sumit Kumar, Mojtaba Nayyeri, Bo Xiong, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Antonio Vergari, Steffen Staab


Abstract
Knowledge Graph Foundation Models (KGFMs) have shown promise in enabling zero-shot reasoning over unseen graphs by learning transferable patterns. However, most existing KGFMs rely solely on graph structure, overlooking the rich semantic signals encoded in textual attributes. We introduce SEMMA, a dual-module KGFM that systematically integrates transferable textual semantics alongside structure. SEMMA leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enrich relation identifiers, generating semantic embeddings that subsequently form a textual relation graph, which is fused with the structural component. Across 54 diverse KGs, SEMMA outperforms purely structural baselines like ULTRA in fully inductive link prediction. Crucially, we show that in more challenging generalization settings, where the test-time relation vocabulary is entirely unseen, structural methods collapse while SEMMA is 2x more effective. Our findings demonstrate that textual semantics are critical for generalization in settings where structure alone fails, highlighting the need for foundation models that unify structural and linguistic signals in knowledge reasoning.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1621
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
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EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
31813–31836
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1621/
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Cite (ACL):
Arvindh Arun, Sumit Kumar, Mojtaba Nayyeri, Bo Xiong, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Antonio Vergari, and Steffen Staab. 2025. SEMMA: A Semantic Aware Knowledge Graph Foundation Model. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 31813–31836, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SEMMA: A Semantic Aware Knowledge Graph Foundation Model (Arun et al., EMNLP 2025)
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