Information extraction for social media

The rapid growth in IT in the last two decades has led to a growth in the amount of information available online. A new style for sharing information is social media. Social media is a continuously instantly updated source of information. In this position paper, we propose a framework for Information Extraction (IE) from unstructured user generated contents on social media. The framework proposes solutions to overcome the IE challenges in this domain such as the short context, the noisy sparse contents and the uncertain contents. To overcome the challenges facing IE from social media, State-Of-The-Art approaches need to be adapted to suit the nature of social media posts. The key components and aspects of our proposed framework are noisy text filtering, named entity extraction, named entity disambiguation, feedback loops, and uncertainty handling

Pair-Linking for Collective Entity Disambiguation: Two Could Be Better Than All

Collective entity disambiguation aims to jointly resolve multiple mentions by linking them to their associated entities in a knowledge base. Previous works are primarily based on the underlying assumption that entities within the same document are highly related. However, the extend to which these mentioned entities are actually connected in reality is rarely studied and therefore raises interesting research questions. For the first time, we show that the semantic relationships between the mentioned entities are in fact less dense than expected. This could be attributed to several reasons such as noise, data sparsity and knowledge base incompleteness. As a remedy, we introduce MINTREE, a new tree-based objective for the entity disambiguation problem. The key intuition behind MINTREE is the concept of coherence relaxation which utilizes the weight of a minimum spanning tree to measure the coherence between entities. Based on this new objective, we design a novel entity disambiguation algorithms which we call Pair-Linking. Instead of considering all the given mentions, Pair-Linking iteratively selects a pair with the highest confidence at each step for decision making. Via extensive experiments, we show that our approach is not only more accurate but also surprisingly faster than many state-of-the-art collective linking algorithms

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

Distant Supervision for Entity Linking

Entity linking is an indispensable operation of populating knowledge repositories for information extraction. It studies on aligning a textual entity mention to its corresponding disambiguated entry in a knowledge repository. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm named distantly supervised entity linking (DSEL), in the sense that the disambiguated entities that belong to a huge knowledge repository (Freebase) are automatically aligned to the corresponding descriptive webpages (Wiki pages). In this way, a large scale of weakly labeled data can be generated without manual annotation and fed to a classifier for linking more newly discovered entities. Compared with traditional paradigms based on solo knowledge base, DSEL benefits more via jointly leveraging the respective advantages of Freebase and Wikipedia. Specifically, the proposed paradigm facilitates bridging the disambiguated labels (Freebase) of entities and their textual descriptions (Wikipedia) for Web-scale entities. Experiments conducted on a dataset of 140,000 items and 60,000 features achieve a baseline F1-measure of 0.517. Furthermore, we analyze the feature performance and improve the F1-measure to 0.545