Rule Learning over Knowledge Graphs: A Review

Abstract

Compared to black-box neural networks, logic rules express explicit knowledge, can provide human-understandable explanations for reasoning processes, and have found their wide application in knowledge graphs and other downstream tasks. As extracting rules manually from large knowledge graphs is labour-intensive and often infeasible, automated rule learning has recently attracted significant interest, and a number of approaches to rule learning for knowledge graphs have been proposed. This survey aims to provide a review of approaches and a classification of state-of-the-art systems for learning first-order logic rules over knowledge graphs. A comparative analysis of various approaches to rule learning is conducted based on rule language biases, underlying methods, and evaluation metrics. The approaches we consider include inductive logic programming (ILP)-based, statistical path generalisation, and neuro-symbolic methods. Moreover, we highlight important and promising application scenarios of rule learning, such as rule-based knowledge graph completion, fact checking, and applications in other research areas.

Keywords

• rule learning
• knowledge graphs
• link prediction