Constructing Temporal Dynamic Knowledge Graphs from Interactive Text-based Games

Abstract: In natural language processing, interactive text-based games serve as a test bed for interactive AI systems. Prior work has proposed to play text-based games by acting based on discrete knowledge graphs constructed by the Discrete Graph Updater (DGU) to represent the game state from the natural language description. While DGU has shown promising results with high interpretability, it suffers from lower knowledge graph accuracy due to its lack of temporality and limited generalizability to complex environments with objects with the same label. In order to address DGU's weaknesses while preserving its high interpretability, we propose the Temporal Discrete Graph Updater (TDGU), a novel neural network model that represents dynamic knowledge graphs as a sequence of timestamped graph events and models them using a temporal point based graph neural network. Through experiments on the dataset collected from a text-based game TextWorld, we show that TDGU outperforms the baseline DGU. We further show the importance of temporal information for TDGU's performance through an ablation study and demonstrate that TDGU has the ability to generalize to more complex environments with objects with the same label. All the relevant code can be found at \url{https://github.com/yukw777/temporal-discrete-graph-updater}.