Pre-trained Language Model for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion

Author(s): Wenying Feng, Angxiao Zhao, Jianming Li, Zhiqiang Zhang, Yan Jia and Zhaoquan Gu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proven remarkable in natural language processing, which prompts numerous works on knowledge extraction, knowledge fusion, knowledge representation, and knowledge completion. Existing works mainly focus on static multi-relational knowledge graph (KG). Unlike static knowledge graph, temporal knowledge graph (TKG) contains temporal information and evolves over time. Learning and reasoning about the representation of temporal knowledge graph are more difficult. Training or fine-tuning LLMs for temporal graph related tasks incurs significant computational overhead and requires the design of prompts. Conducting tasks of TKG does not necessarily require such complex work. Therefore, we explore temporal knowledge graph completion (TKGC) based on pre-trained “small” language model. We propose TKG-BERT by applying BERT for temporal knowledge graph completion and classification. Specifically, We introduce three ways to model temporal knowledge in TKG-BERT: vanilla knowledge embedding (Van.), explicit time modeling (Exp.) and implicit time modeling (Imp.). TKG-BERT(Van.) only adopts static knowledge without embedding time information; TKG-BERT(Exp.) embeds timestamp in quadruple explicitly; TKG-BERT(Imp.) models time implicitly, by dividing the training set and testing set in chronological order. We conduct experiments on ICEWS14 and ICEWS05-15, which are two public temporal knowledge graph datasets. Various experiments of temporal knowledge graph completion and classification tasks show the effectiveness of pre-trained language model for TKG completion. We also compare the performance of TKG-BERT accross different time modeling way and proportion of training set.