Collective Entity Resolution with Multi-Focal Attention

Entity resolution is the task of linking each mention of an entity in text to the corresponding record in a knowledge base (KB). Coherence models for entity resolution encourage all referring expressions in a document to resolve to entities that are related in the KB. We explore attentionlike mechanisms for coherence, where the evidence for each candidate is based on a small set of strong relations, rather than relations to all other entities in the document. The rationale is that documentwide support may simply not exist for non-salient entities, or entities not densely connected in the KB. Our proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art systems on the CoNLL 2003, TAC KBP 2010, 2011 and 2012 tasks.