Embedding Logical Queries on Knowledge Graphs

Hamilton, Will, Bajaj, Payal, Zitnik, Marinka, Jurafsky, Dan, Leskovec, Jure

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Learning low-dimensional embeddings of knowledge graphs is a powerful approach used to predict unobserved or missing edges between entities. However, an open challenge in this area is developing techniques that can go beyond simple edge prediction and handle more complex logical queries, which might involve multiple unobserved edges, entities, and variables. For instance, given an incomplete biological knowledge graph, we might want to predict "em what drugs are likely to target proteins involved with both diseases X and Y?" -- a query that requires reasoning about all possible proteins that might interact with diseases X and Y. Here we introduce a framework to efficiently make predictions about conjunctive logical queries -- a flexible but tractable subset of first-order logic -- on incomplete knowledge graphs. In our approach, we embed graph nodes in a low-dimensional space and represent logical operators as learned geometric operations (e.g., translation, rotation) in this embedding space.