Parallel Knowledge Embedding with MapReduce on a Multi-core Processor

Abstract: This article firstly attempts to explore parallel algorithms of learning distributed representations for both entities and relations in large-scale knowledge repositories with {\it MapReduce} programming model on a multi-core processor. We accelerate the training progress of a canonical knowledge embedding method, i.e. {\it translating embedding} ({\bf TransE}) model, by dividing a whole knowledge repository into several balanced subsets, and feeding each subset into an individual core where local embeddings can concurrently run updating during the {\it Map} phase. However, it usually suffers from inconsistent low-dimensional vector representations of the same key, which are collected from different {\it Map} workers, and further leads to conflicts when conducting {\it Reduce} to merge the various vectors associated with the same key. Therefore, we try several strategies to acquire the merged embeddings which may not only retain the performance of {\it entity inference}, {\it relation prediction}, and even {\it triplet classification} evaluated by the single-thread {\bf TransE} on several well-known knowledge bases such as Freebase and NELL, but also scale up the learning speed along with the number of cores within a processor. So far, the empirical studies show that we could achieve comparable results as the single-thread {\bf TransE} performs by the {\it stochastic gradient descend} (SGD) algorithm, as well as increase the training speed multiple times via adapting the {\it batch gradient descend} (BGD) algorithm for {\it MapReduce} paradigm.