A neural knowledge graph evaluator: Combining structural and semantic evidence of knowledge graphs for predicting supportive knowledge in scientific QA

Effectively detecting supportive knowledge of answers is a fundamental step towards automated question answering. While pre-trained semantic vectors for texts have enabled semantic computation for background-answer pairs, they are limited in representing structured knowledge relevant for question answering. Recent studies have shown interests in enrolling structured knowledge graphs for text processing, however, their focus was more on semantics than on graph structure. This study, by contrast, takes a special interest in exploring the structural patterns of knowledge graphs. Inspired by human cognitive processes, we propose novel methods of feature extraction for capturing the local and global structural information of knowledge graphs. These features not only exhibit good indicative power, but can also facilitate text analysis with explainable meanings. Moreover, aiming to better combine structural and semantic evidence for prediction, we propose a Neural Knowledge Graph Evaluator (NKGE) which showed superior performance over existing methods. Our contributions include a novel set of interpretable structural features and the effective NKGE for compatibility evaluation between knowledge graphs. The methods of feature extraction and the structural patterns indicated by the features may also provide insights for related studies in computational modeling and processing of knowledge.