Dual De-confounded Causal Intervention method for knowledge graph error detection

Abstract

Due to the Knowledge Graph (KG) construction process, erroneous triples are virtually inevitable to be introduced into real-world KGs. Since these errors hinder the expressiveness and applicability of KGs, the development of knowledge graph error detection (KGED) methods is necessary. Despite the overall effectiveness of current KGED methods, their capacity to identify challenging errors is limited. In this work, we conduct empirical studies and find that previous works introduce structural and semantic bias, impeding the identification of erroneous triples, especially in challenging cases. To address this issue, we design a causal graph for the KGED task and propose a Dual De-confounded Causal Intervention (DuDCI) method for debiasing. Firstly, DuDCI utilizes the neighborhood and textual descriptions of triples to calculate their graph and text embeddings. Next, a Causal De-confounded Module is constructed to mitigate the impact of shortcuts caused by the bias through the front-door adjustment. Furthermore, we introduce Disentanglement Constraints to disentangle the information expressed by each embedding, thereby facilitating further bias mitigation. Experimental results on three widely used KGED datasets validate the effectiveness of DuDCI and demonstrate that DuDCI outperforms current KGED methods, with an improvement of at least 2.2%, especially in more challenging noise scenarios.