"One Entity per Discourse" and "One Entity per Collocation" Improve Named-Entity Disambiguation

The “one sense per discourse” (OSPD) and “one sense per collocation” (OSPC) hypotheses have been very influential in Word Sense Disambiguation. The goal of this paper is twofold: (i) to explore whether these hypotheses hold for entities, that is, whether several mentions in the same discourse (or the same collocation) tend to refer to the same entity or not, and (ii) test their impact in Named-Entity Disambiguation (NED). Our experiments show consistent results on different collections and three state-of-the-art NED system. OSPD hypothesis holds in around 96%-98% of documents whereas OSPC hypothesis holds in 91%-98% of collocations. Furthermore, a simple NED post-processing in which the majority entity is promoted, produces a gain in performance in all cases, reaching up to 8 absolute points of improvement in F-measure. These results show that NED systems would benefit of considering these hypotheses into their implementation.