Linking named entities to Wikipedia

Natural language is fraught with problems of ambiguity, including name reference. A name in text can refer to multiple entities just as an entity can be known by different names. This thesis examines how a mention in text can be linked to an external knowledge base (KB), in our case, Wikipedia. The named entity linking (NEL) task requires systems to identify the KB entry, or Wikipedia article, that a mention refers to; or, if the KB does not contain the correct entry, return NIL. Entity linking systems can be complex and we present a framework for analysing their different components, which we use to analyse three seminal systems which are evaluated on a common dataset and we show the importance of precise search for linking. The Text Analysis Conference (TAC) is a major venue for NEL research. We report on our submissions to the entity linking shared task in 2010, 2011 and 2012. The information required to disambiguate entities is often found in the text, close to the mention. We explore apposition, a common way for authors to provide information about entities. We model syntactic and semantic restrictions with a joint model that achieves state-of-the-art apposition extraction performance. We generalise from apposition to examine local descriptions specified close to the mention. We add local description to our state-of-the-art linker by using patterns to extract the descriptions and matching against this restricted context. Not only does this make for a more precise match, we are also able to model failure to match. Local descriptions help disambiguate entities, further improving our state-of-the-art linker. The work in this thesis seeks to link textual entity mentions to knowledge bases. Linking is important for any task where external world knowledge is used and resolving ambiguity is fundamental to advancing research into these problems

A Survey of Location Prediction on Twitter

Locations, e.g., countries, states, cities, and point-of-interests, are central to news, emergency events, and people's daily lives. Automatic identification of locations associated with or mentioned in documents has been explored for decades. As one of the most popular online social network platforms, Twitter has attracted a large number of users who send millions of tweets on daily basis. Due to the world-wide coverage of its users and real-time freshness of tweets, location prediction on Twitter has gained significant attention in recent years. Research efforts are spent on dealing with new challenges and opportunities brought by the noisy, short, and context-rich nature of tweets. In this survey, we aim at offering an overall picture of location prediction on Twitter. Specifically, we concentrate on the prediction of user home locations, tweet locations, and mentioned locations. We first define the three tasks and review the evaluation metrics. By summarizing Twitter network, tweet content, and tweet context as potential inputs, we then structurally highlight how the problems depend on these inputs. Each dependency is illustrated by a comprehensive review of the corresponding strategies adopted in state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we also briefly review two related problems, i.e., semantic location prediction and point-of-interest recommendation. Finally, we list future research directions.Comment: Accepted to TKDE. 30 pages, 1 figur

How can voting mechanisms improve the robustness and generalizability of toponym disambiguation?

A vast amount of geographic information exists in natural language texts, such as tweets and news. Extracting geographic information from texts is called Geoparsing, which includes two subtasks: toponym recognition and toponym disambiguation, i.e., to identify the geospatial representations of toponyms. This paper focuses on toponym disambiguation, which is usually approached by toponym resolution and entity linking. Recently, many novel approaches have been proposed, especially deep learning-based approaches, such as CamCoder, GENRE, and BLINK. In this paper, a spatial clustering-based voting approach that combines several individual approaches is proposed to improve SOTA performance in terms of robustness and generalizability. Experiments are conducted to compare a voting ensemble with 20 latest and commonly-used approaches based on 12 public datasets, including several highly ambiguous and challenging datasets (e.g., WikToR and CLDW). The datasets are of six types: tweets, historical documents, news, web pages, scientific articles, and Wikipedia articles, containing in total 98,300 places across the world. The results show that the voting ensemble performs the best on all the datasets, achieving an average Accuracy@161km of 0.86, proving the generalizability and robustness of the voting approach. Also, the voting ensemble drastically improves the performance of resolving fine-grained places, i.e., POIs, natural features, and traffic ways.Comment: 32 pages, 15 figure

エンティティ・リンキングのための候補検索とランキング方法に関する研究

Tohoku University乾健太郎課

Integración de anotaciones espaciales automáticas de diferentes fuentes mediante tecnologías semánticas

Information Extraction is one of the main tasks in Text Mining, which is essential for all types of applications exploiting geographic information because there is a big volume of geographic information not directly compiled in specific formats proposed by Geographic Information Systems, but just embedded in plain text sources. Currently, there are several software solutions for the processing of texts and the annotation of spatial named entities. However, the problem of these tools is that their output is based on heterogeneous annotation languages, which make it difficult their integration in other systems.The objective of this work is to propose the conversion of the output of these tools into a common spatial annotation language based on semantic technologies to facilitate their integration and interoperability. As a common annotation language we propose the use of a text annotation based on RDFa and using the vocabulary proposed by the international initiative Schema.org. In order to validate this proposal, we have created the necessary infrastructure to build a semantic repository of documents, where the annotations generated by different annotation tools can be integrated and harmonized.La extracción de información es una de las tareas principales de la minería de textos que resulta de gran utilidad para todo tipo de aplicaciones que exploten la información geográfica ya que hay gran cantidad de información geográfica que no se recopila directamente en formatos reconocibles por Sistemas de Información Geográfica, sino directamente como texto plano. Actualmente existen diversas soluciones informáticas para el procesamiento de textos y la anotación de entidades espaciales. Sin embargo, el problema que tienen estas herramientas es que producen como resultado de este procesamiento un texto anotado con lenguajes de marcado propio, que dificulta su integración en otros sistemas. El objetivo de este trabajo es proponer la conversión de la salida de estas herramientas a un lenguaje de anotación espacial común basado en tecnologías semánticas que facilite su integración e interoperabilidad. Como factor común de los lenguajes de marcado se propone una anotación de textos basada en RDFa y utilizando el vocabulario de la iniciativa internacional Schema.org. Para validar la utilidad de esta propuesta se ha creado la infraestructura necesaria para construir un repositorio semántico de documentos donde se integren y armonicen las anotaciones generadas por diversas herramientas de anotación existentes

Web knowledge bases

Knowledge is key to natural language understanding. References to specific people, places and things in text are crucial to resolving ambiguity and extracting meaning. Knowledge Bases (KBs) codify this information for automated systems — enabling applications such as entity-based search and question answering. This thesis explores the idea that sites on the web may act as a KB, even if that is not their primary intent. Dedicated kbs like Wikipedia are a rich source of entity information, but are built and maintained at an ongoing cost in human effort. As a result, they are generally limited in terms of the breadth and depth of knowledge they index about entities. Web knowledge bases offer a distributed solution to the problem of aggregating entity knowledge. Social networks aggregate content about people, news sites describe events with tags for organizations and locations, and a diverse assortment of web directories aggregate statistics and summaries for long-tail entities notable within niche movie, musical and sporting domains. We aim to develop the potential of these resources for both web-centric entity Information Extraction (IE) and structured KB population. We first investigate the problem of Named Entity Linking (NEL), where systems must resolve ambiguous mentions of entities in text to their corresponding node in a structured KB. We demonstrate that entity disambiguation models derived from inbound web links to Wikipedia are able to complement and in some cases completely replace the role of resources typically derived from the KB. Building on this work, we observe that any page on the web which reliably disambiguates inbound web links may act as an aggregation point for entity knowledge. To uncover these resources, we formalize the task of Web Knowledge Base Discovery (KBD) and develop a system to automatically infer the existence of KB-like endpoints on the web. While extending our framework to multiple KBs increases the breadth of available entity knowledge, we must still consolidate references to the same entity across different web KBs. We investigate this task of Cross-KB Coreference Resolution (KB-Coref) and develop models for efficiently clustering coreferent endpoints across web-scale document collections. Finally, assessing the gap between unstructured web knowledge resources and those of a typical KB, we develop a neural machine translation approach which transforms entity knowledge between unstructured textual mentions and traditional KB structures. The web has great potential as a source of entity knowledge. In this thesis we aim to first discover, distill and finally transform this knowledge into forms which will ultimately be useful in downstream language understanding tasks

Georeferencing flickr resources based on textual meta-data

The task of automatically estimating the location of web resources is of central importance in location-based services on the Web. Much attention has been focused on Flickr photos and videos, for which it was found that language modeling approaches are particularly suitable. In particular, state-of-the art systems for georeferencing Flickr photos tend to cluster the locations on Earth in a relatively small set of disjoint regions, apply feature selection to identify location-relevant tags, then use a form of text classification to identify which area is most likely to contain the true location of the resource, and finally attempt to find an appropriate location within the identified area. In this paper, we present a systematic discussion of each of the aforementioned components, based on the lessons we have learned from participating in the 2010 and 2011 editions of MediaEval’s Placing Task. Extensive experimental results allow us to analyze why certain methods work well on this task and show that a median error of just over 1 km can be achieved on a standard benchmark test set