Efficient and Effective Entity Alignment for Evolving Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs), which record the evolution of relationships among entities over time, have been increasingly used in a myriad of applications. Despite their growing importance, the challenge of aligning entities in these evolving structures has yet to be satisfactorily addressed. Most existing techniques struggle to keep pace with the continual stream of new entities and relations, which is a defining characteristic of TKGs. In response to this challenge, we propose a novel teacher-student approach for incremental entity alignment in evolving TKGs. Our solution leverages a Graph Attention Network (GAT) as the teacher model and a sampling Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) as a lightweight, adaptable student model. This approach efficiently navigates the evolving complexities inherent in TKGs, leading to remarkable improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of entity alignment. The experimental results substantiate the superior performance of our approach in achieving effective entity alignment promptly, outstripping existing state-of-the-art models. As such, our study contributes a crucial step towards efficiently handling evolving entity alignment tasks in TKGs.