Ranking vs. Classifying: Measuring Knowledge Base Completion Quality
  Knowledge base completion (KBC) methods aim at inferring missing facts from
the information present in a knowledge base (KB) by estimating the likelihood
of candidate facts. In the prevailing evaluation paradigm, models do not
actually decide whether a new fact should be accepted or not but are solely
judged on the position of true facts in a likelihood ranking with other
candidates. We argue that consideration of binary predictions is essential to
reflect the actual KBC quality, and propose a novel evaluation paradigm,
designed to provide more transparent model selection criteria for a realistic
scenario. We construct the data set FB14k-QAQ where instead of single facts, we
use KB queries, i.e., facts where one entity is replaced with a variable, and
construct corresponding sets of entities that are correct answers. We randomly
remove some of these correct answers from the data set, simulating the
realistic scenario of real-world entities missing from a KB. This way, we can
explicitly measure a model's ability to handle queries that have more correct
answers in the real world than in the KB, including the special case of queries
without any valid answer. The latter especially contrasts the ranking setting.
We evaluate a number of state-of-the-art KB embeddings models on our new
benchmark. The differences in relative performance between ranking-based and
classification-based evaluation that we observe in our experiments confirm our
hypothesis that good performance on the ranking task does not necessarily
translate to good performance on the actual completion task. Our results
motivate future work on KB embedding models with better prediction separability
and, as a first step in that direction, we propose a simple variant of TransE
that encourages thresholding and achieves a significant improvement in
classification F1 score relative to the original TransE.
