P-NAL: an Effective and Interpretable Entity Alignment Method

Entity alignment (EA) aims to find equivalent entities between two Knowledge Graphs. Existing embedding-based EA methods usually encode entities as embeddings, triples as embeddings' constraint and learn to align the embeddings. The structural and side information are usually utilized via embedding propagation, aggregation or interaction. However, the details of the underlying logical inference steps among the alignment process are usually omitted, resulting in inadequate inference process. In this paper, we introduce P-NAL, an entity alignment method that captures two types of logical inference paths with Non-Axiomatic Logic (NAL). Type 1 is the bridge-like inference path between to-be-aligned entity pairs, consisting of two relation/attribute triples and a similarity sentence between the other two entities. Type 2 links the entity pair by their embeddings. P-NAL iteratively aligns entities and relations by integrating the conclusions of the inference paths. Moreover, our method is logically interpretable and extensible due to the expressiveness of NAL. Our proposed method is suitable for various EA settings. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of Hits@1, achieving 0.98+ on all three datasets of DBP15K with both supervised and unsupervised settings. To our knowledge, we present the first in-depth analysis of entity alignment's basic principles from a unified logical perspective.