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AceKG: Academic Knowledge Graph

Updated 22 February 2026
  • AceKG is a large-scale academic knowledge graph featuring 3.13B RDF triples covering papers, authors, fields, venues, and institutes.
  • It employs a consistent ontology with over 100 relation types and unique URIs, ensuring precise entity disambiguation and comprehensive multi-relational coverage.
  • AceKG serves as a benchmark environment for tasks such as link prediction, community detection, and scholar profiling using advanced embedding and inference methods.

AceKG is a large-scale academic knowledge graph (KG) comprising 3.13 billion RDF triples derived from a consistent ontology designed for high-fidelity academic data mining. Its schema represents essential entities and their relations—spanning papers, authors, fields of study, venues, and institutes—with fine-grained resolution achieved via unique URIs, addressing long-standing issues of name ambiguity and insufficient multi-relational coverage. AceKG serves as both a foundational academic resource and a rigorous benchmark environment for algorithmic evaluation in knowledge representation, link prediction, scholarly community detection, and author profiling (Wang et al., 2018).

1. Ontology: Entity Classes, Relations, and Hierarchies

AceKG instantiates a directed, labeled multi-relational graph G=(E,R,T)G = (E, R, T) with EE as entities, RR as relation types, and T⊆E×R×ET \subseteq E \times R \times E as factual triples. The five disjoint top-level entity classes are:

C={ Paper,  Author,  Field,  Venue,  Institute }\mathcal{C} = \{\, \mathsf{Paper},\; \mathsf{Author},\; \mathsf{Field},\; \mathsf{Venue},\; \mathsf{Institute}\, \}

Each entity e∈Ee \in E is assigned a unique URI for unambiguous identification, enabling, for example, distinct representations for similarly-named authors (such as ace:7E7A3A69 vs. ace:7E0D6766 for two different "Jiawei Han" entities).

The relation vocabulary RR is extensive (∼\sim100 types) and includes:

  • paper_is_written_by\mathsf{paper\_is\_written\_by}: encodes authorship,
  • paper_cites_paper\mathsf{paper\_cites\_paper}: denotes citation,
  • EE0,
  • EE1,
  • EE2: defines a DAG over fields of study,
  • and further relations such as EE3 and EE4.

Hierarchical, compositional, and numeric data is attached via relations such as EE5 (for taxonomy) and unary predicates (for literals including citation counts and publication dates).

2. Scale, Statistics, and Dataset Partitions

AceKG encodes EE6 triples and EE7 entities, with explicit class counts:

Entity Class Count
Papers EE8
Authors EE9
Fields of Study RR0
Venues RR1 (journals) + RR2 (conferences)
Institutes RR3

AceKG-derived benchmark datasets include:

  • AK18K for link prediction (RR4, RR5; train/validation/test counts: RR6130,265/7,429/7,336),
  • Six field-specific heterogeneous collaboration graphs (e.g., Biology, Computer Science, Economics, Medicine, Physics, and a union of five fields),
  • A "Google-Scholar-venue" graph of 600K papers, 635K authors, 151 venues, and 2.37M edges.

All primary data originates from the in-house Acemap repository, normalized and deduplicated; disambiguation is ensured via systematic URI assignment. Preprocessing also normalizes literals and dates to facilitate large-scale, machine-compliant operations.

3. Entity Alignment and Rule-based Inference

Entity alignment integrates AceKG with prominent external bibliographic databases (IEEE, ACM, DBLP). Mappings are computed by matching paper title and author lists, principally using cosine similarity of TF-IDF representations:

RR7

Titles may also be matched using edit distance. At threshold RR8, the mapping achieves coverage of 2.33M (IEEE), 1.91M (ACM), and 2.27M (DBLP) papers.

Rule-based inference employs Horn-style rules to further augment the graph. Representative rules include:

  • RR9,
  • T⊆E×R×ET \subseteq E \times R \times E0.

This suggests that AceKG provides both explicit and inferred relational knowledge, improving its utility for downstream analytics.

AceKG supports systematic evaluation via canonical academic data mining tasks:

Given a triple set T⊆E×R×ET \subseteq E \times R \times E1, entities T⊆E×R×ET \subseteq E \times R \times E2 are embedded as T⊆E×R×ET \subseteq E \times R \times E3 and relations T⊆E×R×ET \subseteq E \times R \times E4 as T⊆E×R×ET \subseteq E \times R \times E5, using scoring functions T⊆E×R×ET \subseteq E \times R \times E6 to predict missing links. Evaluated methods and representative scoring functions include:

  • TransE: T⊆E×R×ET \subseteq E \times R \times E7,
  • TransH: projection onto relation-specific hyperplanes,
  • DistMult: T⊆E×R×ET \subseteq E \times R \times E8,
  • HolE: T⊆E×R×ET \subseteq E \times R \times E9 (circular correlation),
  • ComplEx: C={ Paper,  Author,  Field,  Venue,  Institute }\mathcal{C} = \{\, \mathsf{Paper},\; \mathsf{Author},\; \mathsf{Field},\; \mathsf{Venue},\; \mathsf{Institute}\, \}0 with complex-valued embeddings.

All models use embedding dimension C={ Paper,  Author,  Field,  Venue,  Institute }\mathcal{C} = \{\, \mathsf{Paper},\; \mathsf{Author},\; \mathsf{Field},\; \mathsf{Venue},\; \mathsf{Institute}\, \}1, margin C={ Paper,  Author,  Field,  Venue,  Institute }\mathcal{C} = \{\, \mathsf{Paper},\; \mathsf{Author},\; \mathsf{Field},\; \mathsf{Venue},\; \mathsf{Institute}\, \}2, learning rate C={ Paper,  Author,  Field,  Venue,  Institute }\mathcal{C} = \{\, \mathsf{Paper},\; \mathsf{Author},\; \mathsf{Field},\; \mathsf{Venue},\; \mathsf{Institute}\, \}3, and SGD with early stopping on validation MRR; loss C={ Paper,  Author,  Field,  Venue,  Institute }\mathcal{C} = \{\, \mathsf{Paper},\; \mathsf{Author},\; \mathsf{Field},\; \mathsf{Venue},\; \mathsf{Institute}\, \}4 is a margin ranking loss with one-entity corrupted negatives per triple.

4.2 Community Detection and Scholar Classification

On extracted collaboration graphs, network representation learning is performed via:

  • DeepWalk: homogeneous random walks with Skip-Gram,
  • LINE: first- and second-order proximity preservation,
  • PTE: joint text-network embeddings,
  • metapath2vec: heterogeneous walks along user-defined metapaths.

Resulting node embeddings feed into logistic regression (5-fold CV) for classification (metrics: Micro-F1, Macro-F1) and k-means clustering (NMI metric) for community detection.

5. Experimental Results and Analytical Insights

Filtered MRR and Hits@C={ Paper,  Author,  Field,  Venue,  Institute }\mathcal{C} = \{\, \mathsf{Paper},\; \mathsf{Author},\; \mathsf{Field},\; \mathsf{Venue},\; \mathsf{Institute}\, \}5 (for C={ Paper,  Author,  Field,  Venue,  Institute }\mathcal{C} = \{\, \mathsf{Paper},\; \mathsf{Author},\; \mathsf{Field},\; \mathsf{Venue},\; \mathsf{Institute}\, \}6) for several knowledge embedding models:

Model MRR Hits@1 Hits@10
TransE 0.719 62.7% 89.2%
TransH 0.701 61.0% 84.6%
DistMult 0.749 68.7% 86.1%
HolE 0.864 83.8% 88.2%
ComplEx 0.817 75.4% 89.0%

HolE and ComplEx exhibit superior capability for modeling antisymmetric relationships, which characterize all seven AK18K relation types. TransE outperforms TransH in Hits@10, plausibly due to a high proportion of many-to-many relations (94%) and a limited relation schema, where the benefit from hyperplane projection (TransH) is minimal. AK18K results fall between FB15K and WN18 benchmarks; this is attributed to moderate graph sparsity and the relatively simple relation schema.

5.2 Scholar Classification and Clustering

Micro-F1 and Macro-F1 scores (classification) and normalized mutual information (clustering):

Dataset DeepWalk LINE(1+2) PTE metapath2vec
biology .792/.547 .722/.445 .759/.495 .828/.637
computer sci. .545/.454 .633/.542 .574/.454 .678/.570
economics .692/.277 .717/.385 .654/.276 .753/.485
medicine .663/.496 .701/.577 .694/.555 .770/.659
physics .774/.592 .779/.640 .723/.571 .794/.635
5-Fields union .731/.589 .755/.655 .664/.528 .831/.682
Google-venues .948/.942 .955/.949 .966/.961 .971/.968

Clustering (NMI):

Method FOS Google
DeepWalk 0.277 0.394
LINE(1+2) 0.305 0.459
PTE 0.153 0.602
metapath2vec 0.427 0.836

Metapath2vec, by exploiting heterogeneous context, consistently achieves superior classification and clustering performance. The Google-venue graph's higher data quality (top venues, reduced interdisciplinarity) yields increased performance across methods. A pronounced Micro-F1 to Macro-F1 drop indicates major label imbalance and cross-field scholarly activity.

6. Applications and Prospective Research Avenues

AceKG underpins multiple academic data mining tasks:

  • Cooperation Prediction: Embeddings encode institutional, field, and citation proximity, supporting co-authorship link prediction.
  • Author Disambiguation: Hetero-typed relational context enables distinction of same-name authors; iterative URI refinement is supported via embedding-space clustering.
  • Rising-Star Detection: Temporal AceKG snapshots, combined with feature trajectories and embedding novelty, support early-career impact forecasting.

Future research directions include dynamic KG updates (streaming ingestion), fine-grained event extraction, graph neural networks over heterogeneous schemas, and cross-modal knowledge integration (e.g., PDF content, code repositories). The scale, ontological clarity, and connection to external bibliographic resources position AceKG as a foundational asset for scalable, multi-facet academic knowledge discovery and benchmarking (Wang et al., 2018).

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