Gathering Alternative Surface Forms for DBpedia Entities

Wikipedia is often used a source of surface forms, or alternative reference strings for an entity, required for entity linking, disambiguation or coreference resolution tasks. Surface forms have been extracted in a number of works from Wikipedia labels, redirects, disambiguations and anchor texts of internal Wikipedia links, which we complement with anchor texts of external Wikipedia links from the Common Crawl web corpus. We tackle the problem of quality of Wikipedia-based surface forms, which has not been raised before. We create the gold standard for the dataset quality evaluation, which reveales the surprisingly low precision of the Wikipedia-based surface forms. We propose filtering approaches that allowed boosting the precision from 75% to 85% for a random entity subset, and from 45% to more than 65% for the subset of popular entities. The filtered surface form dataset as well the gold standard are made publicly available.