Neural entity context models

A prevalent approach of entity-oriented systems involves retrieving relevant entities by harnessing knowledge graph embeddings. These embeddings encode entity information in the context of the knowledge graph and are static in nature. Our goal is to generate entity embeddings that capture what renders them relevant for the query. This differs from entity embeddings constructed with static resource, for example, E-BERT. Previously, Dalton et al. [3] demonstrated the benefits obtained with the Entity Context Model, a pseudo-relevance feedback approach based on entity links in relevant contexts. In this work, we reinvent the Entity Context Model (ECM) for neural graph networks and incorporate pre-trained embeddings. We introduce three entity ranking models based on fundamental principles of ECM: (1) Graph Attention Networks, (2) Simple Graph Relevance Networks, and (3) Graph Relevance Networks. Graph Attention Networks and Graph Relevance Networks are the graph neural variants of ECM, that employ attention mechanism and relevance information of the relevant context respectively to ascertain entity relevance. Our experiments demonstrate that our neural variants of the ECM model significantly outperform the state-of-the-art BERT-ER [2] by more than 14% and exceeds the performance of systems that use knowledge graph embeddings by over 101%. Notably, our findings reveal that leveraging the relevance of the relevant context is more effective at identifying relevant entities than the attention mechanism. To evaluate the efficacy of the models, we conduct experiments on two standard benchmark datasets, DBpediaV2 and TREC Complex Answer Retrieval. To aid reproducibility, our code and data are available.