Named Entity Resolution Using Automatically Extracted Semantic Information

One major problem in text mining and semantic retrieval is that detected entity mentions have to be assigned to the true underlying entity. The ambiguity of a name results from both the polysemy and synonymy problem, as the name of a unique entity may be written in variant ways and different unique entities may have the same name. The term “bush” for instance may refer to a woody plant, a mechanical fixing, a nocturnal primate, 52 persons and 8 places covered in Wikipedia and thousands of other persons. For the first time, according to our knowledge we apply a kernel entity resolution approach to the German Wikipedia as reference for named entities. We describe the context of named entities in Wikipedia and the context of a detected name phrase in a new document by a context vector of relevant features. These are designed from automatically extracted topic indicators generated by an LDA topic model. We use kernel classifiers, e.g. rank classifiers, to determine the right matching entity but also to detect uncovered entities. In comparison to a baseline approach using only text similarity the addition of topics approach gives a much higher f-value, which is comparable to the results published for English. It turns out that the procedure also is able to detect with high reliability if a person is not covered by the Wikipedia.