# Numerical Literals in Link Prediction: A Critical Examination of Models and Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.18241 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18241/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Embedding Entities and Relations for Learning and Inference in Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6575/) (2014)
- [Complex Embeddings for Simple Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06357/) (2016)
- [KG-BERT: BERT for Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03193/) (2019)
- [TuckER: Tensor Factorization for Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09590/) (2019)
- [The Surprising Power of Graph Neural Networks with Random Node Initialization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01179/) (2020)
- [SimKGC: Simple Contrastive Knowledge Graph Completion with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02167/) (2022)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Knowledge Graph Completion and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10321/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: Opportunities and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06374/) (2023)
- [Embedding Multimodal Relational Data for Knowledge Base Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01341/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Graph Embeddings with Literals: Which model links better Literal-ly?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12507/) (2019)
- [Incorporating Literals into Knowledge Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00934/) (2018)
- [KBLRN : End-to-End Learning of Knowledge Base Representations with Latent, Relational, and Numerical Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04676/) (2017)
- [PaGE-Link: Path-based Graph Neural Network Explanation for Heterogeneous Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12465/) (2023)
- [Multi-task Neural Network for Non-discrete Attribute Prediction in Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04828/) (2017)
- [Augmenting Knowledge Graphs for Better Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13965/) (2022)
- [Insights from an OTTR-centric Ontology Engineering Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13130/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ReaLitE: Enrichment of Relation Embeddings in Knowledge Graphs using Numeric Literals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00852/) (2025)
- [Neural Regression with Embeddings for Numerical Attribute Prediction in Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26729/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Link Prediction(LP) is an essential task over Knowledge Graphs(KGs), traditionally focussed on using and predicting the relations between entities. Textual entity descriptions have already been shown to be valuable, but models that incorporate numerical literals have shown minor improvements on existing benchmark datasets. It is unclear whether a model is actually better in using numerical literals, or better capable of utilizing the graph structure. This raises doubts about the effectiveness of these methods and about the suitability of the existing benchmark datasets. We propose a methodology to evaluate LP models that incorporate numerical literals. We propose i) a new synthetic dataset to better understand how well these models use numerical literals and ii) dataset ablations strategies to investigate potential difficulties with the existing datasets. We identify a prevalent trend: many models underutilize literal information and potentially rely on additional parameters for performance gains. Our investigation highlights the need for more extensive evaluations when releasing new models and datasets.