xERTE: Explainable Reasoning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs for Forecasting Future Links

Interest has been rising lately towards modeling time-evolving knowledge graphs (KGs). Recently, graph representation learning approaches have become the dominant paradigm for link prediction on temporal KGs. However, the embedding-based approaches largely operate in a black-box fashion, lacking the ability to judge the results' reliability. This paper provides a future link forecasting framework that reasons over query-relevant subgraphs of temporal KGs and jointly models the graph structures and the temporal context information. Especially, we propose a temporal relational attention mechanism and a novel reverse representation update scheme to guide the extraction of an enclosing subgraph around the query. The subgraph is expanded by an iterative sampling of temporal neighbors and attention propagation. As a result, our approach provides human-understandable arguments for the prediction. We evaluate our model on four benchmark temporal knowledge graphs for the link forecasting task. While being more explainable, our model also obtains a relative improvement of up to 17.7 $\%$ on MRR compared to the previous best KG forecasting methods. We also conduct a survey with 53 respondents, and the results show that the reasoning arguments extracted by the model for link forecasting are aligned with human understanding.