xERTE: Explainable Reasoning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs for Forecasting Future Links

Interest has been rising lately towards modeling time-evolving knowledge graphs (KGs). Recently, graph representation learning approaches have become the dominant paradigm for link prediction on temporal KGs. However, the embeddingbased approaches largely operate in a black-box fashion, lacking the ability to judge the results' reliability. This paper provides a future link forecasting framework that reasons over query-relevant subgraphs of temporal KGs and jointly models the graph structures and the temporal context information. Especially, we propose a temporal relational attention mechanism and a novel reverse representation update scheme to guide the extraction of an enclosing subgraph around the query. The subgraph is expanded by an iterative sampling of temporal neighbors and attention propagation. As a result, our approach provides humanunderstandable arguments for the prediction. We evaluate our model on four benchmark temporal knowledge graphs for the link forecasting task. While being more explainable, our model also obtains a relative improvement of up to 17.7 % on MRR compared to the previous best KG forecasting methods. We also conduct a survey with 53 respondents, and the results show that the reasoning arguments extracted by the model for link forecasting are aligned with human understanding. Reasoning, a process of inferring new knowledge from available facts, has long been considered to be an essential subject in artificial intelligence (AI). Recently, the KGaugmented reasoning process has been studied in (Das et al., 2017; Ren et al., 2020), where knowledge graphs store factual information in form of triples (s, p, o), e.g. In particular, s (subject) and o (object) are expressed as nodes in knowledge graphs and p (predicate) as an edge type. Most knowledge graph models assume that the underlying graph is static. However, in the real world, facts and knowledge change with time, which can be treated as time-dependent multi-relational data. To accommodate time-evolving multi-relational data, temporal KGs have been introduced (Boschee et al., 2015), where temporal events are represented as a quadruple by extending the static triplet with timestamps describing when these events occurred, i.e. (Barack Obama, inaugurated, as president of the US, 2009/01/20).