Probabilistic Logic Neural Networks for Reasoning

Knowledge graph reasoning, which aims at predicting missing facts through reasoning with observed facts, is critical for many applications. Such a problem has been widely explored by traditional logic rule-based approaches and recent knowledge graph embedding methods. A principled logic rule-based approach is the Markov Logic Network (MLN), which is able to leverage domain knowledge with first-order logic and meanwhile handle uncertainty. However, the inference in MLNs is usually very difficult due to the complicated graph structures. Different from MLNs, knowledge graph embedding methods (e.g. TransE, DistMult) learn effective entity and relation embeddings for reasoning, which are much more effective and efficient. However, they are unable to leverage domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose the probabilistic Logic Neural Network (pLogicNet), which combines the advantages of both methods. A pLogicNet defines the joint distribution of all possible triplets by using a Markov logic network with first-order logic, which can be efficiently optimized with the variational EM algorithm. Specifically, in the E-step, a knowledge graph embedding model is used for inferring the missing triplets, while in the M-step, the weights of the logic rules are updated according to both the observed and predicted triplets. Experiments on multiple knowledge graphs prove the effectiveness of pLogicNet over many competitive baselines.