IE-Evo: Internal and External Evolution-Enhanced Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting

Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) forecasting is widely used in various fields due to its ability to infer future events based on historical information. Modeling the internal structures and chronological dependencies of historical subgraph sequences has been proven effective. Nevertheless, on the one hand, the TKG forecasting process generally suffers from a lack of sufficient sample data due to historical resource limitations; thus, most works focus on continuously mining the patterns of historical sequences while ignoring the semantically-rich background information provided by external knowledge, especially when historical query-related information is scarce. On the other hand, when merely serializing the given subgraph sequence to mimic its temporal evolution process, only the chronological dependencies between the subgraphs can be considered, thus ignoring the evolution of time information. Hence, a method that integrates internal and external knowledge to enhance the representations of entities is urgently needed. To this end, we propose a novel TKG forecasting method, namely, the internal and external evolution-enhanced framework (IE-Evo). For the former issue, we design an external evolution encoder and use a pre-trained language model (PLM) to provide powerful external knowledge semantics for TKG forecasting. To address the latter concern, we propose an internal evolution encoder that explicitly embeds the time information while modeling the aggregation and evolution processes of the observed sequential structural information. IE-Evo has been evaluated on four public benchmark datasets, showcasing its significant improvements across multiple evaluation metrics.