Generations of Knowledge Graphs: The Crazy Ideas and the Business Impact

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have been used to support a wide range of applications, from web search to personal assistant. In this paper, we describe three generations of knowledge graphs: entity-based KGs, which have been supporting general search and question answering (e.g., at Google and Bing); text-rich KGs, which have been supporting search and recommendations for products, bio-informatics, etc. (e.g., at Amazon and Alibaba); and the emerging integration of KGs and LLMs, which we call dual neural KGs. We describe the characteristics of each generation of KGs, the crazy ideas behind the scenes in constructing such KGs, and the techniques developed over time to enable industry impact. In addition, we use KGs as examples to demonstrate a recipe to evolve research ideas from innovations to production practice, and then to the next level of innovations, to advance both science and business.

Head-to-Tail: How Knowledgeable are Large Language Models (LLM)? A.K.A. Will LLMs Replace Knowledge Graphs?

Since the recent prosperity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been interleaved discussions regarding how to reduce hallucinations from LLM responses, how to increase the factuality of LLMs, and whether Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which store the world knowledge in a symbolic form, will be replaced with LLMs. In this paper, we try to answer these questions from a new angle: How knowledgeable are LLMs? To answer this question, we constructed Head-to-Tail, a benchmark that consists of 18K question-answer (QA) pairs regarding head, torso, and tail facts in terms of popularity. We designed an automated evaluation method and a set of metrics that closely approximate the knowledge an LLM confidently internalizes. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 14 publicly available LLMs, we show that existing LLMs are still far from being perfect in terms of their grasp of factual knowledge, especially for facts of torso-to-tail entities.

OA-Mine: Open-World Attribute Mining for E-Commerce Products with Weak Supervision

Automatic extraction of product attributes from their textual descriptions is essential for online shopper experience. One inherent challenge of this task is the emerging nature of e-commerce products -- we see new types of products with their unique set of new attributes constantly. Most prior works on this matter mine new values for a set of known attributes but cannot handle new attributes that arose from constantly changing data. In this work, we study the attribute mining problem in an open-world setting to extract novel attributes and their values. Instead of providing comprehensive training data, the user only needs to provide a few examples for a few known attribute types as weak supervision. We propose a principled framework that first generates attribute value candidates and then groups them into clusters of attributes. The candidate generation step probes a pre-trained language model to extract phrases from product titles. Then, an attribute-aware fine-tuning method optimizes a multitask objective and shapes the language model representation to be attribute-discriminative. Finally, we discover new attributes and values through the self-ensemble of our framework, which handles the open-world challenge. We run extensive experiments on a large distantly annotated development set and a gold standard human-annotated test set that we collected. Our model significantly outperforms strong baselines and can generalize to unseen attributes and product types.

Deep Transfer Learning for Multi-source Entity Linkage via Domain Adaptation

Multi-source entity linkage focuses on integrating knowledge from multiple sources by linking the records that represent the same real world entity. This is critical in high-impact applications such as data cleaning and user stitching. The state-of-the-art entity linkage pipelines mainly depend on supervised learning that requires abundant amounts of training data. However, collecting well-labeled training data becomes expensive when the data from many sources arrives incrementally over time. Moreover, the trained models can easily overfit to specific data sources, and thus fail to generalize to new sources due to significant differences in data and label distributions. To address these challenges, we present AdaMEL, a deep transfer learning framework that learns generic high-level knowledge to perform multi-source entity linkage. AdaMEL models the attribute importance that is used to match entities through an attribute-level self-attention mechanism, and leverages the massive unlabeled data from new data sources through domain adaptation to make it generic and data-source agnostic. In addition, AdaMEL is capable of incorporating an additional set of labeled data to more accurately integrate data sources with different attribute importance. Extensive experiments show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art results with 8.21% improvement on average over methods based on supervised learning. Besides, it is more stable in handling different sets of data sources in less runtime.

End-to-End Conversational Search for Online Shopping with Utterance Transfer

Successful conversational search systems can present natural, adaptive and interactive shopping experience for online shopping customers. However, building such systems from scratch faces real word challenges from both imperfect product schema/knowledge and lack of training dialog data.In this work we first propose ConvSearch, an end-to-end conversational search system that deeply combines the dialog system with search. It leverages the text profile to retrieve products, which is more robust against imperfect product schema/knowledge compared with using product attributes alone. We then address the lack of data challenges by proposing an utterance transfer approach that generates dialogue utterances by using existing dialog from other domains, and leveraging the search behavior data from e-commerce retailer. With utterance transfer, we introduce a new conversational search dataset for online shopping. Experiments show that our utterance transfer method can significantly improve the availability of training dialogue data without crowd-sourcing, and the conversational search system significantly outperformed the best tested baseline.

PAM: Understanding Product Images in Cross Product Category Attribute Extraction

Understanding product attributes plays an important role in improving online shopping experience for customers and serves as an integral part for constructing a product knowledge graph. Most existing methods focus on attribute extraction from text description or utilize visual information from product images such as shape and color. Compared to the inputs considered in prior works, a product image in fact contains more information, represented by a rich mixture of words and visual clues with a layout carefully designed to impress customers. This work proposes a more inclusive framework that fully utilizes these different modalities for attribute extraction. Inspired by recent works in visual question answering, we use a transformer based sequence to sequence model to fuse representations of product text, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tokens and visual objects detected in the product image. The framework is further extended with the capability to extract attribute value across multiple product categories with a single model, by training the decoder to predict both product category and attribute value and conditioning its output on product category. The model provides a unified attribute extraction solution desirable at an e-commerce platform that offers numerous product categories with a diverse body of product attributes. We evaluated the model on two product attributes, one with many possible values and one with a small set of possible values, over 14 product categories and found the model could achieve 15% gain on the Recall and 10% gain on the F1 score compared to existing methods using text-only features.

AdaTag: Multi-Attribute Value Extraction from Product Profiles with Adaptive Decoding

Automatic extraction of product attribute values is an important enabling technology in e-Commerce platforms. This task is usually modeled using sequence labeling architectures, with several extensions to handle multi-attribute extraction. One line of previous work constructs attribute-specific models, through separate decoders or entirely separate models. However, this approach constrains knowledge sharing across different attributes. Other contributions use a single multi-attribute model, with different techniques to embed attribute information. But sharing the entire network parameters across all attributes can limit the model's capacity to capture attribute-specific characteristics. In this paper we present AdaTag, which uses adaptive decoding to handle extraction. We parameterize the decoder with pretrained attribute embeddings, through a hypernetwork and a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module. This allows for separate, but semantically correlated, decoders to be generated on the fly for different attributes. This approach facilitates knowledge sharing, while maintaining the specificity of each attribute. Our experiments on a real-world e-Commerce dataset show marked improvements over previous methods.

CoRI: Collective Relation Integration with Data Augmentation for Open Information Extraction

Integrating extracted knowledge from the Web to knowledge graphs (KGs) can facilitate tasks like question answering. We study relation integration that aims to align free-text relations in subject-relation-object extractions to relations in a target KG. To address the challenge that free-text relations are ambiguous, previous methods exploit neighbor entities and relations for additional context. However, the predictions are made independently, which can be mutually inconsistent. We propose a two-stage Collective Relation Integration (CoRI) model, where the first stage independently makes candidate predictions, and the second stage employs a collective model that accesses all candidate predictions to make globally coherent predictions. We further improve the collective model with augmented data from the portion of the target KG that is otherwise unused. Experiment results on two datasets show that CoRI can significantly outperform the baselines, improving AUC from .677 to .748 and from .716 to .780, respectively.

TCN: Table Convolutional Network for Web Table Interpretation

Information extraction from semi-structured webpages provides valuable long-tailed facts for augmenting knowledge graph. Relational Web tables are a critical component containing additional entities and attributes of rich and diverse knowledge. However, extracting knowledge from relational tables is challenging because of sparse contextual information. Existing work linearize table cells and heavily rely on modifying deep language models such as BERT which only captures related cells information in the same table. In this work, we propose a novel relational table representation learning approach considering both the intra- and inter-table contextual information. On one hand, the proposed Table Convolutional Network model employs the attention mechanism to adaptively focus on the most informative intra-table cells of the same row or column; and, on the other hand, it aggregates inter-table contextual information from various types of implicit connections between cells across different tables. Specifically, we propose three novel aggregation modules for (i) cells of the same value, (ii) cells of the same schema position, and (iii) cells linked to the same page topic. We further devise a supervised multi-task training objective for jointly predicting column type and pairwise column relation, as well as a table cell recovery objective for pre-training. Experiments on real Web table datasets demonstrate our method can outperform competitive baselines by +4.8% of F1 for column type prediction and by +4.1% of F1 for pairwise column relation prediction.

J-Recs: Principled and Scalable Recommendation Justification

Online recommendation is an essential functionality across a variety of services, including e-commerce and video streaming, where items to buy, watch, or read are suggested to users. Justifying recommendations, i.e., explaining why a user might like the recommended item, has been shown to improve user satisfaction and persuasiveness of the recommendation. In this paper, we develop a method for generating post-hoc justifications that can be applied to the output of any recommendation algorithm. Existing post-hoc methods are often limited in providing diverse justifications, as they either use only one of many available types of input data, or rely on the predefined templates. We address these limitations of earlier approaches by developing J-Recs, a method for producing concise and diverse justifications. J-Recs is a recommendation model-agnostic method that generates diverse justifications based on various types of product and user data (e.g., purchase history and product attributes). The challenge of jointly processing multiple types of data is addressed by designing a principled graph-based approach for justification generation. In addition to theoretical analysis, we present an extensive evaluation on synthetic and real-world data. Our results show that J-Recs satisfies desirable properties of justifications, and efficiently produces effective justifications, matching user preferences up to 20% more accurately than baselines.