ConGraT: Self-Supervised Contrastive Pretraining for Joint Graph and Text Embeddings

William Brannon, Wonjune Kang, Suyash Fulay, Hang Jiang, Brandon Roy, Deb Roy, Jad Kabbara


Abstract
Learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs), in which nodes are associated with one or more texts, has been the subject of much recent work. However, most approaches tend to make strong assumptions about the downstream task of interest, are reliant on hand-labeled data, or fail to equally balance the importance of both text and graph representations. In this work, we propose Contrastive Graph-Text pretraining (ConGraT), a general, self-supervised approach for jointly learning separate representations of texts and nodes in a TAG. Our method trains a language model (LM) and a graph neural network (GNN) to align their representations in a common latent space using a batch-wise contrastive learning objective inspired by CLIP. We further propose an extension to the CLIP objective that leverages graph structure to incorporate information about inter-node similarity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConGraT outperforms baselines on various downstream tasks, including node and text category classification, link prediction, and language modeling. Finally, we present an application of our method to community detection in social graphs, which enables finding more textually grounded communities, rather than purely graph-based ones.
Anthology ID:
2024.textgraphs-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of TextGraphs-17: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Dmitry Ustalov, Yanjun Gao, Alexander Panchenko, Elena Tutubalina, Irina Nikishina, Arti Ramesh, Andrey Sakhovskiy, Ricardo Usbeck, Gerald Penn, Marco Valentino
Venues:
TextGraphs | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19–39
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.textgraphs-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
William Brannon, Wonjune Kang, Suyash Fulay, Hang Jiang, Brandon Roy, Deb Roy, and Jad Kabbara. 2024. ConGraT: Self-Supervised Contrastive Pretraining for Joint Graph and Text Embeddings. In Proceedings of TextGraphs-17: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing, pages 19–39, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ConGraT: Self-Supervised Contrastive Pretraining for Joint Graph and Text Embeddings (Brannon et al., TextGraphs-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.textgraphs-1.2.pdf