GeoEntity-type constrained knowledge graph embedding for predicting natural-language spatial relations

Natural-language spatial relations between geographic entities (geoentities) reflect diverse perceptions influenced by factors like location, culture, and linguistic conventions. These relations play a crucial role in supporting geospatial tasks, such as question answering and cognitive reasoning. While prior studies focused on a limited set of human-selected spatial terms and geometric attributes, they often overlooked essential semantic attributes. To overcome this limitation, we developed a Spatial Relation-based Knowledge Graph Embedding framework, SR-KGE, with new KG fusion functions to predict spatial relation terms among distinct geoentities. This method not only considers graph structures and the diversity of natural language expressions in the embedding and learning process, but also incorporates geoentity types as a constraint to capture spatial and semantic relations more accurately. Our experiments on two knowledge graph datasets, one small-scale and one large-scale, have both shown its superior performance in spatial relation inference compared to popular KGE models, including TransE, RotatE, and HAKE. We hope our research will advance the classic study of natural language described spatial relations in a more automated and intelligent way.