MLMLM: link prediction with mean likelihood masked language model

Knowledge Bases (KBs) are easy to query, verifiable, and interpretable. They however scale with man-hours and high-quality data. Masked Language Models (MLMs), such as BERT, scale with computing power as well as unstructured raw text data. The knowledge contained within these models is however not directly interpretable. We propose to perform link prediction with MLMs to address both the KBs scalability issues and the MLMs interpretability issues. By committing the knowledge embedded in MLMs to a KB, it becomes interpretable. To do that we introduce MLMLM, Mean Likelihood Masked Language Model, an approach comparing the mean likelihood of generating the different entities to perform link prediction in a tractable manner. We obtain State of the Art (SotA) results on the WN18RR dataset and SotA results on the Precision@1 metric on the WikidataM5 inductive and transductive setting. We also obtain convincing results on link prediction on previously unseen entities, making MLMLM a suitable approach to introducing new entities to a KB.