Discovering Mis-Categorized Entities

Entity categorization – the process of grouping entities into categories – is an important problem with a great many applications. Unfortunately, in practice, many entities are mis-categorized, such as Google Scholar and Amazon products. In this paper, we study the problem of discovering miscategorized entities from a given group of entities. This problem is inherently hard: all entities within the same group have been “well” categorized by state-of-the-art solutions. Apparently, it is nontrivial to differentiate them. We propose a novel rule-based framework to solve this problem. It first uses positive rules to compute disjoint partitions of entities, where the partition with the largest size is taken as the correctly categorized partition, namely the pivot partition. It then uses negative rules to identify mis-categorized entities in other partitions that are dissimilar to the entities in the pivot partition. We describe optimizations on applying these rules, and discuss how to generate positive/negative rules. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our solution.