Building Relatedness Explanations from Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are a key ingredient to complement search results, discover entities and their relations and support several knowledge discovery tasks. We face the problem of building relatedness explanations, that is, graphs that can explain how a pair of entities is related in a KG. Explanations can be used in a variety of tasks; from exploratory search to query answering. We formalize the notion of explanation and present two algorithms. The first, E4D (Explanations from Data), assembles explanations starting from all paths interlinking the source and target entity in the data. The second algorithm E4S (Explanations from Schema) builds explanations focused on a specific relatedness perspective expressed by providing a predicate. E4S first generates candidate explanation patterns at the level of schema; then, it assembles explanations by proceeding to their verification in the data. Given a set of paths, found by E4D or E4S, we describe different criteria to build explanations based on information-theory, diversity and their combination. As a concrete use-case of relatedness explanations, we introduce relatedness-based KG querying, which revisits the query-by-example paradigm from the perspective of relatedness explanations. We implemented all machineries in the RECAP tool, which is based on RDF and SPARQL. We discuss an evaluation of the explanation building algorithms and a comparison of RECAP with related systems on real-world data.