  Signed graphs are complex systems that represent trust relationships or
preferences in various domains. Learning node representations in such graphs is
crucial for many mining tasks. Although real-world signed relationships can be
influenced by multiple latent factors, most existing methods often oversimplify
the modeling of signed relationships by relying on social theories and treating
them as simplistic factors. This limits their expressiveness and their ability
to capture the diverse factors that shape these relationships. In this paper,
we propose DINES, a novel method for learning disentangled node representations
in signed directed graphs without social assumptions. We adopt a disentangled
framework that separates each embedding into distinct factors, allowing for
capturing multiple latent factors. We also explore lightweight graph
convolutions that focus solely on sign and direction, without depending on
social theories. Additionally, we propose a decoder that effectively classifies
an edge's sign by considering correlations between the factors. To further
enhance disentanglement, we jointly train a self-supervised factor
discriminator with our encoder and decoder. Throughout extensive experiments on
real-world signed directed graphs, we show that DINES effectively learns
disentangled node representations, and significantly outperforms its
competitors in the sign prediction task.
