Discriminative predicate path mining for fact checking in knowledge graphs

• Published in: Knowledge-based systems Vol. 104; pp. 123 - 133
• Main Authors: Shi, Baoxu, Weninger, Tim
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 15.07.2016
• Subjects: Fact checking; Knowledge graph; Path finding; Path finding; Fact checking; Knowledge graph
• ISSN: 0950-7051; 1872-7409
• DOI: 10.1016/j.knosys.2016.04.015

Traditional fact checking by experts and analysts cannot keep pace with the volume of newly created information. It is important and necessary, therefore, to enhance our ability to computationally determine whether some statement of fact is true or false. We view this problem as a link-prediction task in a knowledge graph, and present a discriminative path-based method for fact checking in knowledge graphs that incorporates connectivity, type information, and predicate interactions. Given a statement S of the form (subject, predicate, object), for example, (Chicago, capitalOf, Illinois), our approach mines discriminative paths that alternatively define the generalized statement (U.S. city, predicate, U.S. state) and uses the mined rules to evaluate the veracity of statement S. We evaluate our approach by examining thousands of claims related to history, geography, biology, and politics using a public, million node knowledge graph extracted from Wikipedia and PubMedDB. Not only does our approach significantly outperform related models, we also find that the discriminative predicate path model is easily interpretable and provides sensible reasons for the final determination.