Semantic proximity search on heterogeneous graph by proximity embedding

Many real-world networks have a rich collection of objects. The semantics of these objects allows us to capture different classes of proximities, thus enabling an important task of semantic proximity search. As the core of semantic proximity search, we have to measure the proximity on a heterogeneous graph, whose nodes are various types of objects. Most of the existing methods rely on engineering features about the graph structure between two nodes to measure their proximity. With recent development on graph embedding, we see a good chance to avoid feature engineering for semantic proximity search. There is very little work on using graph embedding for semantic proximity search. We also observe that graph embedding methods typically focus on embedding nodes, which is an "indirect" approach to learn the proximity. Thus, we introduce a new concept of proximity embedding, which directly embeds the network structure between two possibly distant nodes. We also design our proximity embedding, so as to flexibly support both symmetric and asymmetric proximities. Based on the proximity embedding, we can easily estimate the proximity score between two nodes and enable search on the graph. We evaluate our proximity embedding method on three real-world public data sets, and show it outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. We release the code for proximity embedding¹.