Named entity discovery (NED) is an important information retrieval problem that can be decomposed into two sub-problems. The first sub-problem, named entity recognition (NER), aims to tag pre-defined sets of words in a vocabulary (called "named entities": names, places, locations, ...) when they appear in natural language. The second subproblem, named entity linking identification (NEL), considers these entity mentions as queries to be identified in a pre-existing database. In this paper, we consider the NEL problem, and assume a set of queries (or mentions) that have to be identified within a knowledge base. This knowledge base is represented by a text database paired with a semantic graph. We present state-of-the-art methods in NEL, and propose a 2-step method for individual identification of named entities. Our approach is well-motivated by the limitations brought by recent deep learning approaches that lack interpratability, and require lots of parameter tuning along with large volume of annotated data. First of all, we propose a filtering algorithm designed with information retrieval and text mining techniques, aiming to maximize precision at K (typically for 5 <= K <=20). Then, we introduce two graph-based methods for named entity identification to maximize precision at 1 by re-ranking the remaining top entity candidates. The first identification method is using parametrized graph mining, and the second similarity with graph kernels. Our approach capitalizes on a fine-grained classification of entities from annotated web data. We present our algorithms in details, and show experimentally on standard datasets (NIST TAC-KBP, CONLL AIDA) their performance in terms of precision are better than any graph-based method reported, and competitive with state-of-the-art systems. Finally, we conclude on the advantages of our graph-based approach compared to recent deep learning methods.
@cite_15: We describe a neural network model that jointly learns distributed representations of texts and knowledge base (KB) entities. Given a text in the KB, we train our proposed model to predict entities that are relevant to the text. Our model is designed to be generic with the ability to address various NLP tasks with ease. We train the model using a large corpus of texts and their entity annotations extracted from Wikipedia. We evaluated the model on three important NLP tasks (i.e., sentence textual similarity, entity linking, and factoid question answering) involving both unsupervised and supervised settings. As a result, we achieved state-of-the-art results on all three of these tasks. Our code and trained models are publicly available for further academic research.
@cite_22: Given a query consisting of a mention (name string) and a background document, entity disambiguation calls for linking the mention to an entity from reference knowledge base like Wikipedia. Existing studies typically use hand-crafted features to represent mention, context and entity, which is laborintensive and weak to discover explanatory factors of data. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting a new neural network approach. The model takes consideration of the semantic representations of mention, context and entity, encodes them in continuous vector space and effectively leverages them for entity disambiguation. Specifically, we model variable-sized contexts with convolutional neural network, and embed the positions of context words to factor in the distance between context word and mention. Furthermore, we employ neural tensor network to model the semantic interactions between context and mention. We conduct experiments for entity disambiguation on two benchmark datasets from TAC-KBP 2009 and 2010. Experimental results show that our method yields state-of-the-art performances on both datasets.
Recent advances in neural networks conception suggested to use word embeddings and convolutional neural networks to solve the named entity linking problem. @cite_22 proposed to maximize a corrupted cosine similarity between a mention, its annotated gold entity and a false entity. The network is trained with polynomial complexity, and reached state-of-art performance in precision (until 2017 and @cite_15 ) on NIST TAC-KBP datasets in 2009 and 2010.