How to add properties to entity relationships (e.g., proficiency score between Person and Skill)?

[Amitabitbul]

Discussed in #1555

^{Originally posted by Amitabitbul December 24, 2024}
Hi Guys,

I'm exploring how to model relationships between entities that require additional properties. Specifically, I would like to know if adding attributes to the relationships themselves is possible.

Example use case:

• Entity 1: Person
• Entity 2: Skill
• Desired Relationship Property: proficiency_score (indicating how proficient the person is in that skill)

Is this kind of relationship property modeling possible in GraphRAG? If so, could someone provide guidance on how to implement it?

Some specific questions:

1. Does GraphRAG support properties/attributes on relationships?
2. If yes, what's the recommended way to structure this in the knowledge base?
3. If not, are there any workarounds or alternative approaches?

Any examples or documentation references would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[natoverse]

There's not really a way to add arbitrary properties to the output tables. However, you could probably achieve what you wanted with a little prompt engineering. For relationships we ask the LLM to provide a description, and you could update the prompt to make that description include more structured information such as this. The main caveat is that when entities and relationships are found across multiple text units, the instances are summarized into a final description - this is performed by the LLM as well (and has a prompt that can be edited), so it might be difficult to get numerical data summarized acccurately.