  Semantic graphs, such as WordNet, are resources which curate natural language
on two distinguishable layers. On the local level, individual relations between
synsets (semantic building blocks) such as hypernymy and meronymy enhance our
understanding of the words used to express their meanings. Globally, analysis
of graph-theoretic properties of the entire net sheds light on the structure of
human language as a whole. In this paper, we combine global and local
properties of semantic graphs through the framework of Max-Margin Markov Graph
Models (M3GM), a novel extension of Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) that
scales to large multi-relational graphs. We demonstrate how such global
modeling improves performance on the local task of predicting semantic
relations between synsets, yielding new state-of-the-art results on the WN18RR
dataset, a challenging version of WordNet link prediction in which "easy"
reciprocal cases are removed. In addition, the M3GM model identifies
multirelational motifs that are characteristic of well-formed lexical semantic
ontologies.
