Entity resolution has received considerable attention in recent years. Given many references to underlying entities, the goal is to predict which references correspond to the same entity. We show how to extend the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model for this task and propose a probabilistic model for collective entity resolution for relational domains where references are connected to each other. Our approach differs from other recently proposed entity resolution approaches in that it is a) generative, b) does not make pair-wise decisions and c) captures relations between entities through a hidden group variable. We propose a novel sampling algorithm for collective entity resolution which is unsupervised and also takes entity relations into account. Additionally, we do not assume the domain of entities to be known and show how to infer the number of entities from the data. We demonstrate the utility and practicality of our relational entity resolution approach for author resolution in two real-world bibliographic datasets. In addition, we present preliminary results on characterizing conditions under which relational information is useful.

The problem of record linkage focuses on determining whether two object descriptions refer to the same underlying entity. Addressing this problem effectively has many practical applications, e.g., elimination of duplicate records in databases and citation matching for scholarly articles. In this paper, we consider a new domain where the record linkage problem is manifested: Internet comparison shopping. We address the resulting linkage setting that requires learning a similarity function between record pairs from streaming data. The learned similarity function is subsequently used in clustering to determine which records are co-referent and should be linked. We present an online machine learning method for addressing this problem, where a composite similarity function based on a linear combination of basis functions is learned incrementally. We illustrate the efficacy of this approach on several real-world datasets from an Internet comparison shopping site, and show that our method is able to effectively learn various distance functions for product data with differing characteristics. We also provide experimental results that show the importance of considering multiple performance measures in record linkage evaluation. 1

Many data mining tasks require computing similarity between pairs of objects. Pairwise similarity computations are particularly important in record linkage systems, as well as in clustering and schema mapping algorithms. Because the number of object pairs grows quadratically with the size of the dataset, computing similarity between all pairs is impractical and becomes prohibitive for large datasets and complex similarity functions. Blocking methods alleviate this problem by efficiently selecting approximately similar object pairs for subsequent distance computations, leaving out the remaining pairs as dissimilar. Previously proposed blocking methods require manually constructing an indexbased similarity function or selecting a set of predicates, followed by hand-tuning of parameters. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive framework for automatically learning blocking functions that are efficient and accurate. We describe two predicate-based formulations of learnable blocking functions and provide learning algorithms for training them. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is demonstrated on real and simulated datasets, on which they prove to be more accurate than non-adaptive blocking methods. 1

The task of identifying synonymous relations and objects, or synonym resolution, is critical for high-quality information extraction. This paper investigates synonym resolution in the context of unsupervised information extraction, where neither hand-tagged training examples nor domain knowledge is available. The paper presents a scalable, fullyimplemented system that runs in O(KN log N) time in the number of extractions, N, and the maximum number of synonyms per word, K. The system, called Resolver, introduces a probabilistic relational model for predicting whether two strings are co-referential based on the similarity of the assertions containing them. On a set of two million assertions extracted from the Web, Resolver resolves objects with 78 % precision and 68 % recall, and resolves relations with 90 % precision and 35 % recall. Several variations of Resolver’s probabilistic model are explored, and experiments demonstrate that under appropriate conditions these variations can improve F1 by 5%. An extension to the basic Resolver system allows it to handle polysemous names with 97 % precision and 95 % recall on a data set from the TREC corpus.

In this paper we investigate named entity transliteration based on a phonetic scoring method. The phonetic method is computed using phonetic features and carefully designed pseudo features. The proposed method is tested with four languages – Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and Korean – and one source language – English, using comparable corpora. The proposed method is developed from the phonetic method originally proposed in Tao et al. (2006). In contrast to the phonetic method in Tao et al. (2006) constructed on the basis of pure linguistic knowledge, the method in this

In this paper we investigate unsupervised name transliteration using comparable corpora, corpora where texts in the two languages deal in some of the same topics — and therefore share references to named entities — but are not translations of each other. We present two distinct methods for transliteration, one approach using an unsupervised phonetic transliteration method, and the other using the temporal distribution of candidate pairs. Each of these approaches works quite well, but by combining the approaches one can achieve even better results. We believe that the novelty of our approach lies in the phonetic-based scoring method, which is based on a combination of carefully crafted phonetic features, and empirical results from the pronunciation errors of second-language learners of English. Unlike previous approaches to transliteration, this method can in principle work with any pair of languages in the absence of a training dictionary, provided one has an estimate of the pronunciation of words in text. 1

The increasing use of large open-domain document sources is exacerbating the problem of ambiguity in named entities. This paper explores the use of a range of syntactic and semantic features in unsupervised clustering of documents that result from ad hoc queries containing names. From these experiments, we find that the use of robust syntactic and semantic features can significantly improve the state of the art for disambiguation performance for personal names for both Chinese and English.

Coreferencing entities across documents in a large corpus enables advanced document understanding tasks such as question answering. This paper presents a novel cross document coreference approach that leverages the profiles of entities which are constructed by using information extraction tools and reconciled by using a within-document coreference module. We propose to match the profiles by using a learned ensemble distance function comprised of a suite of similarity specialists. We develop a kernelized soft relational clustering algorithm that makes use of the learned distance function to partition the entities into fuzzy sets of identities. We compare the kernelized clustering method with a popular fuzzy relation clustering algorithm (FRC) and show 5% improvement in coreference performance. Evaluation of our proposed methods on a large benchmark disambiguation collection shows that they compare favorably with the top runs in the SemEval evaluation. 1

ABSTRACT: In this paper, firstly we report experimental results on applying information extraction (IE) methodology to the task of summarizing clinical trial design information in focus on “Compared Treatment”, “Endpoint ” and “Patient Population ” from clinical trial MEDLINE abstracts. From these results, we have come to see this problem as one that can be decomposed into a sentence classification subtask and an IE subtask. By classifying sentences from clinical trial abstracts and only performing IE on sentences that are most likely to contain relevant information, we hypothesize that the accuracy of information extracted from the abstracts can be increased. As preparation for testing this theory in the next stage, we conducted an experiment applying state-of-the-art sentence classification techniques to the clinical trial abstracts and evaluated its potential in

Cross Document Coreference (CDC) is the problem of resolving the underlying identity of entities across multiple documents and is a major step for document understanding. We develop a framework to efficiently determine the identity of a person based on extracted information, which includes unary properties such as gender and title, as well as binary relationships with other named entities such as co-occurrence and geo-locations. At the heart of our approach is a suite of similarity functions (specialists) for matching relationships and a relational density-based clustering algorithm that delineates name clusters based on pairwise similarity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on the WePS benchmark datasets and point out future research directions. 1