  In this work, we perform an extensive investigation of two state-of-the-art
(SotA) methods for the task of Entity Alignment in Knowledge Graphs. Therefore,
we first carefully examine the benchmarking process and identify several
shortcomings, which make the results reported in the original works not always
comparable. Furthermore, we suspect that it is a common practice in the
community to make the hyperparameter optimization directly on a test set,
reducing the informative value of reported performance. Thus, we select a
representative sample of benchmarking datasets and describe their properties.
We also examine different initializations for entity representations since they
are a decisive factor for model performance. Furthermore, we use a shared
train/validation/test split for a fair evaluation setting in which we evaluate
all methods on all datasets. In our evaluation, we make several interesting
findings. While we observe that most of the time SotA approaches perform better
than baselines, they have difficulties when the dataset contains noise, which
is the case in most real-life applications. Moreover, we find out in our
ablation study that often different features of SotA methods are crucial for
good performance than previously assumed. The code is available at
https://github.com/mberr/ea-sota-comparison.
