Knowledge Graph Embedding in E-commerce Applications: Attentive Reasoning, Explanations, and Transferable Rules

Knowledge Graphs (KGs), representing facts as triples, have been widely adopted in many applications. Reasoning tasks such as link prediction and rule induction are important for the development of KGs. Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs) embedding entities and relations of a KG into continuous vector spaces, have been proposed for these reasoning tasks and proven to be efficient and robust. But the plausibility and feasibility of applying and deploying KGEs in real-work applications has not been well-explored. In this paper, we discuss and report our experiences of deploying KGEs in a real domain application: e-commerce. We first identity three important desiderata for e-commerce KG systems: 1) attentive reasoning, reasoning over a few target relations of more concerns instead of all; 2) explanation, providing explanations for a prediction to help both users and business operators understand why the prediction is made; 3) transferable rules, generating reusable rules to accelerate the deployment of a KG to new systems. While non existing KGE could meet all these desiderata, we propose a novel one, an explainable knowledge graph attention network that make prediction through modeling correlations between triples rather than purely relying on its head entity, relation and tail entity embeddings. It could automatically selects attentive triples for prediction and records the contribution of them at the same time, from which explanations could be easily provided and transferable rules could be efficiently produced. We empirically show that our method is capable of meeting all three desiderata in our e-commerce application and outperform typical baselines on datasets from real domain applications.
Comment: Accepted at IJCKG2021