TEA: time-aware entity alignment in knowledge graphs

Entity alignment (EA) aims to identify equivalent entities between knowledge graphs (KGs), which is a key technique to improve the coverage of existing KGs. Current EA models largely ignore the importance of time information contained in KGs and treat relational facts or attribute values of entities as time-invariant. However, real-world entities could evolve over time, making the knowledge of the aligned entities very different in multiple KGs. This may cause incorrect matching between KGs if such entity dynamics is ignored. In this paper, we propose a time-aware entity alignment (TEA) model that discovers the entity evolving behaviour by exploring the time contexts in KGs and aggregates various contextual information to make the alignment decision. In particular, we address two main challenges in the TEA model: 1) How to identify highly-correlated temporal facts; 2) How to capture entity dynamics and incorporate it to learn a more informative entity representation for the alignment task. Experiments on real-world datasets1 verify the superiority of our TEA model over state-of-the-art entity aligners.