A Critical Assessment of State-of-the-Art in Entity Alignment

In this work, we perform an extensive investigation of two state-of-the-art (SotA) methods for the task of Entity Alignment in Knowledge Graphs. Therefore, we first carefully examine the benchmarking process and identify several shortcomings, making the results reported in the original works not always comparable. Furthermore, we suspect that it is a common practice in the community to make the hyperparameter optimization directly on a test set, reducing the informative value of reported performance. Thus, we select a representative sample of benchmarking datasets and describe their properties. We also examine different initializations for entity representations since they are a decisive factor for model performance. Furthermore, we use a shared train/validation/test split for an appropriate evaluation setting to evaluate all methods on all datasets. In our evaluation, we make several interesting findings. While we observe that most of the time SotA approaches perform better than baselines, they have difficulties when the dataset contains noise, which is the case in most real-life applications. Moreover, in our ablation study, we find out that often different features of SotA method are crucial for good performance than previously assumed. The code is available at https://github.com/mberr/ea-sota-comparison.