MetaExp: Interactive Explanation and Exploration of Large Knowledge Graphs

We present MetaExp, a system that assists the user during the exploration of large knowledge graphs, given two sets of initial nodes. At its core, MetaExp presents a small set of meta-paths to the user, which are sequences of relationships among node types. Such meta-paths do not overwhelm the user with complex structures, yet they preserve semantically-rich relationships in a graph. MetaExp engages the user in an interactive procedure, which involves simple meta-paths evaluations to infer a user-specific similarity measure. This similarity measure incorporates the domain knowledge and the preferences of the user, overcoming the fundamental limitations of previous methods based on local node neighborhoods or statically determined similarity scores. Our system provides a user-friendly interface for searching initial nodes and guides the user towards progressive refinements of the meta-paths. The system is demonstrated on three datasets, Freebase, a movie database, and a biological network.