Knowledge graph completion is an important task that aims to predict the missing relational link between entities. Knowledge graph embedding methods perform this task by representing entities and relations as embedding vectors and modeling their interactions to compute the matching score of each triple. Previous work has usually treated each embedding as a whole and has modeled the interactions between these whole embeddings, potentially making the model excessively expensive or requiring specially designed interaction mechanisms. In this work, we propose the multi-partition embedding interaction (MEI) model with block term format to systematically address this problem. MEI divides each embedding into a multi-partition vector to efficiently restrict the interactions. Each local interaction is modeled with the Tucker tensor format and the full interaction is modeled with the block term tensor format, enabling MEI to control the trade-off between expressiveness and computational cost, learn the interaction mechanisms from data automatically, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the link prediction task. In addition, we theoretically study the parameter efficiency problem and derive a simple empirically verified criterion for optimal parameter trade-off. We also apply the framework of MEI to provide a new generalized explanation for several specially designed interaction mechanisms in previous models.