Entity alignment via graph neural networks: a component-level study

Entity alignment plays an essential role in the integration of knowledge graphs (KGs) as it seeks to identify entities that refer to the same real-world objects across different KGs. Recent research has primarily centred on embedding-based approaches. Among these approaches, there is a growing interest in graph neural networks (GNNs) due to their ability to capture complex relationships and incorporate node attributes within KGs. Despite the presence of several surveys in this area, they often lack comprehensive investigations specifically targeting GNN-based approaches. Moreover, they tend to evaluate overall performance without analysing the impact of individual components and methods. To bridge these gaps, this paper presents a framework for GNN-based entity alignment that captures the key characteristics of these approaches. We conduct a fine-grained analysis of individual components and assess their influences on alignment results. Our findings highlight specific module options that significantly affect the alignment outcomes. By carefully selecting suitable methods for combination, even basic GNN networks can achieve competitive alignment results.