Product Name Classification for Product Instance Distinction

Product names with a temporal cue in a product review often refer to several product instances purchased at different times. Previous approaches to product entity recognition and temporal information analysis do not take into account such temporal cues and thus fail to distinguish different product instances. We propose to formulate the resolution of such product names as a classification problem by utilizing time expressions, event features and other temporal cues for a classifier in two stages, detecting the existence of such temporal cues and identifying the purchase time. The empirical results show that term-based features and existing event-based features together enhance the performance of product instance distinction.