MRAEA: An Efficient and Robust Entity Alignment Approach for Cross-lingual Knowledge Graph

Entity alignment to find equivalent entities in cross-lingual Knowledge Graphs (KGs) plays a vital role in automatically integrating multiple KGs. Existing translation-based entity alignment methods jointly model the cross-lingual knowledge and monolingual knowledge into one unified optimization problem. On the other hand, the Graph Neural Network (GNN) based methods either ignore the node differentiations, or represent relation through entity or triple instances. They all fail to model the meta semantics embedded in relation nor complex relations such as n-to-n and multi-graphs. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel Meta Relation Aware Entity Alignment (MRAEA) to directly model cross-lingual entity embeddings by attending over the node's incoming and outgoing neighbors and its connected relations' meta semantics. In addition, we also propose a simple and effective bi-directional iterative strategy to add new aligned seeds during training. Our experiments on all three benchmark entity alignment datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, exceeding by 15%-58% on Hit@1. Through an extensive ablation study, we validate that the proposed meta relation aware representations, relation aware self-attention and bi-directional iterative strategy of new seed selection all make contributions to significant performance improvement. The code is available at https://github.com/MaoXinn/MRAEA.