Knowledge Graph Construction Pipeline: Entity Extraction, Relation Resolution, and Ontology Linking

Unstructured text documents contain rich semantic relationships, but search engines and LLM agents struggle to navigate complex dependency graphs without structured entity modeling.

A Knowledge Graph Construction Pipeline converts raw prose, technical documentation, and tabular corpora into machine-actionable RDF Triples \langle ext{Subject}, ext{Predicate}, ext{Object} angle bound to a formal ontology (W3C OWL / SKOS). This guide details the 5 stages of the graph construction lifecycle: Document Chunking, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction, Entity Resolution (Deduplication), and Graph Store Projection.


1. Quick-Reference: The Graph Construction Lifecycle

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                           KNOWLEDGE GRAPH PIPELINE STAGES                                             |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stage                  | Input Payload                          | Primary Technique          | Target Output Format   |
+------------------------+----------------------------------------+----------------------------+------------------------+
| 1. Document Ingestion  | Raw Markdown / PDFs / HTML             | Structural AST Tokenization| Clean Section Segments |
| 2. Entity Extraction   | Text Segments                          | Few-shot LLM / GLiNER      | Entity Mentions & Types|
| 3. Relation Extraction | Entities + Context                     | OpenIE / Schema Constrained| Directed Triples       |
| 4. Entity Resolution   | Raw Entity Nodes                       | String Distance + Cosine   | Canonical URI / IRI    |
| 5. Knowledge Store Sync| Validated Triples                      | SPARQL Updates / Jena TDB2 | Persistent Jena Graph  |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

2. Entity & Relation Extraction (LLM vs. Small Specialized Models)

                    +-----------------------------+
                    | Raw Text Context Segment    |
                    +--------------+--------------+
                                   |
              +--------------------+--------------------+
              |                                         |
              v                                         v
+---------------------------+             +---------------------------+
| Fast Specialized NER      |             | Schema-Constrained LLM    |
| (GLiNER / Spacy RoBERTa)  |             | (Pydantic Function Call)  |
| - High Speed (<15ms)      |             | - Rich Context Relations  |
| - Fixed Entity Types      |             | - Disambiguates Homonyms  |
+-------------+-------------+             +-------------+-------------+
              |                                         |
              +--------------------+--------------------+
                                   |
                                   v
                    +-----------------------------+
                    | Extracted Candidate Triples |
                    +-----------------------------+

Structured Extraction Schema (Pydantic / OpenAI Function Calling)

from pydantic import BaseModel, Field
from typing import List, Literal

class ExtractedEntity(BaseModel):
    name: str = Field(description="Canonical entity name")
    entity_type: Literal["Architecture", "Protocol", "Algorithm", "Framework", "Organization"]
    description: str = Field(description="One-sentence technical definition")

class ExtractedRelation(BaseModel):
    subject_entity: str
    predicate: Literal["implements", "extends", "depends_on", "mitigates", "replaces"]
    object_entity: str
    evidence: str = Field(description="Verbatim sentence proving the relation")

class GraphExtractionPayload(BaseModel):
    entities: List[ExtractedEntity]
    relations: List[ExtractedRelation]

3. Entity Resolution & Canonical IRI Grounding

Raw text frequently refers to the same underlying entity using varying lexical forms: "PostgreSQL", "Postgres", "pg", and "Postgres DB". Inserting all 4 as distinct nodes fractures the Knowledge Graph.

Resolution Protocol

  1. Exact & Alias Table Lookup: Fast O(1) mapping against known redirects (Postgres -> PostgreSQL).
  2. Jaro-Winkler & Levenshtein Distance: Flags slight spelling variations.
  3. Embedding Cosine Clustering: For ambiguous abbreviations, compare the candidate mention vector with existing entity description embeddings.
  4. W3C owl:sameAs Projection: For cross-ontology mapping, link entities via canonical IRIs (https://wiki.wikantik.com/id/page/01KQ0P...).

References

  1. Hogan, A., et al. (2021). Knowledge Graphs. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 54(4), 1-37.
  2. Zaratiana, U., et al. (2024). GLiNER: Generalist Model for Named Entity Recognition using Bidirectional Transformer. NAACL 2024.
  3. Brickley, D., & Guha, R. V. (2014). RDF Schema 1.1. W3C Recommendation.