TaxoExpan: Self-supervised Taxonomy Expansion with Position-Enhanced Graph Neural Network

Jiaming Shen, Zhihong Shen, Chenyan Xiong, Chi Wang, Kuansan Wang, Jiawei Han

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Taxonomies consist of machine-interpretable semantics and provide valuable knowledge for many web applications. For example, online retailers (e.g., Amazon and eBay) use taxonomies for product recommendation, and web search engines (e.g., Google and Bing) leverage taxonomies to enhance query understanding. Enormous efforts have been made on constructing taxonomies either manually or semi-automatically. However, with the fast-growing volume of web content, existing taxonomies will become outdated and fail to capture emerging knowledge. Therefore, in many applications, dynamic expansions of an existing taxonomy are in great demand. In this paper, we study how to expand an existing taxonomy by adding a set of new concepts. We propose a novel self-supervised framework, named TaxoExpan, which automatically generates a set of ĝquery concept, anchor concept»pairs from the existing taxonomy as training data. Using such self-supervision data, TaxoExpan learns a model to predict whether a query concept is the direct hyponym of an anchor concept. We develop two innovative techniques in TaxoExpan: (1) a position-enhanced graph neural network that encodes the local structure of an anchor concept in the existing taxonomy, and (2) a noise-robust training objective that enables the learned model to be insensitive to the label noise in the self-supervision data. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets from different domains demonstrate both the effectiveness and the efficiency of TaxoExpan for taxonomy expansion.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationThe Web Conference 2020 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2020
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages486-497
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781450370233
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 20 2020
Event29th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2020 - Taipei, Taiwan, Province of China
Duration: Apr 20 2020Apr 24 2020

Publication series

NameThe Web Conference 2020 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2020

Conference

Conference29th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2020
Country/TerritoryTaiwan, Province of China
CityTaipei
Period4/20/204/24/20

Keywords

  • Self-supervised Learning
  • Taxonomy Expansion

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Software

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