Select-and-Evaluate: A Learning Framework for Large-Scale Knowledge Graph Search

Querying graph structured data is a fundamental operation that enables important applications including knowledge graph search, social network analysis, and cyber-network security. However, the growing size of real-world data graphs poses severe challenges for graph search to meet the response-time requirements of the applications. To address these scalability challenges, we develop a learning framework for graph search called Select-and-Evaluate (SCALE). The key insight is to select a small part of the data graph that is sufficient to answer a given query in order to satisfy the specified constraints on time or accuracy. We formulate the problem of generating the candidate subgraph as a computational search process and induce search control knowledge from training queries using imitation learning. First, we define a search space over candidate selection plans, and identify target selection plans corresponding to the training queries by performing an expensive search. Subsequently, we learn greedy search control knowledge to imitate the search behavior of the target selection plans. Our experiments on large-scale knowledge graphs including DBpedia, YAGO, and Freebase show that using the learned selection plans, we can significantly improve the computational-efficiency of graph search to achieve high accuracy.