Name Disambiguation from link data in a collaboration graph using temporal and topological features

In a social community, multiple persons may share the same name, phone number or some other identifying attributes. This, along with other phenomena, such as name abbreviation, name misspelling, and human error leads to erroneous aggregation of records of multiple persons under a single reference. Such mistakes affect the performance of document retrieval, web search, database integration, and more importantly, improper attribution of credit (or blame). The task of entity disambiguation partitions the records belonging to multiple persons with the objective that each decomposed partition is composed of records of a unique person. Existing solutions to this task use either biographical attributes, or auxiliary features that are collected from external sources, such as Wikipedia. However, for many scenarios, such auxiliary features are not available, or they are costly to obtain. Besides, the attempt of collecting biographical or external data sustains the risk of privacy violation. In this work, we propose a method for solving entity disambiguation task from link information obtained from a collaboration network. Our method is non-intrusive of privacy as it uses only the time-stamped graph topology of an anonymized network. Experimental results on two real-life academic collaboration networks show that the proposed method has satisfactory performance.Comment: The short version of this paper has been accepted to ASONAM 201

Fuzzy Ants Clustering for Web People Search

A search engine query for a person’s name often brings up web pages corresponding to several people who share the same name. The Web People Search (WePS) problem involves organizing such search results for an ambiguous name query in meaningful clusters, that group together all web pages corresponding to one single individual. A particularly challenging aspect of this task is that it is in general not known beforehand how many clusters to expect. In this paper we therefore propose the use of a Fuzzy Ants clustering algorithm that does not rely on prior knowledge of the number of clusters that need to be found in the data. An evaluation on benchmark data sets from SemEval’s WePS1 and WePS2 competitions shows that the resulting system is competitive with the agglomerative clustering Agnes algorithm. This is particularly interesting as the latter involves manual setting of a similarity threshold (or estimating the number of clusters in advance) while the former does not

Towards Name Disambiguation: Relational, Streaming, and Privacy-Preserving Text Data

In the real world, our DNA is unique but many people share names. This phenomenon often causes erroneous aggregation of documents of multiple persons who are namesakes of one another. Such mistakes deteriorate the performance of document retrieval, web search, and more seriously, cause improper attribution of credit or blame in digital forensics. To resolve this issue, the name disambiguation task 1 is designed to partition the documents associated with a name reference such that each partition contains documents pertaining to a unique real-life person. Existing algorithms for this task mainly suffer from the following drawbacks. First, the majority of existing solutions substantially rely on feature engineering, such as biographical feature extraction, or construction of auxiliary features from Wikipedia. However, for many scenarios, such features may be costly to obtain or unavailable in privacy sensitive domains. Instead we solve the name disambiguation task in restricted setting by leveraging only the relational data in the form of anonymized graphs. Second, most of the existing works for this task operate in a batch mode, where all records to be disambiguated are initially available to the algorithm. However, more realistic settings require that the name disambiguation task should be performed in an online streaming fashion in order to identify records of new ambiguous entities having no preexisting records. Finally, we investigate the potential disclosure risk of textual features used in name disambiguation and propose several algorithms to tackle the task in a privacy-aware scenario. In summary, in this dissertation, we present a number of novel approaches to address name disambiguation tasks from the above three aspects independently, namely relational, streaming, and privacy preserving textual data

Hi, how can I help you?: Automating enterprise IT support help desks

Question answering is one of the primary challenges of natural language understanding. In realizing such a system, providing complex long answers to questions is a challenging task as opposed to factoid answering as the former needs context disambiguation. The different methods explored in the literature can be broadly classified into three categories namely: 1) classification based, 2) knowledge graph based and 3) retrieval based. Individually, none of them address the need of an enterprise wide assistance system for an IT support and maintenance domain. In this domain the variance of answers is large ranging from factoid to structured operating procedures; the knowledge is present across heterogeneous data sources like application specific documentation, ticket management systems and any single technique for a general purpose assistance is unable to scale for such a landscape. To address this, we have built a cognitive platform with capabilities adopted for this domain. Further, we have built a general purpose question answering system leveraging the platform that can be instantiated for multiple products, technologies in the support domain. The system uses a novel hybrid answering model that orchestrates across a deep learning classifier, a knowledge graph based context disambiguation module and a sophisticated bag-of-words search system. This orchestration performs context switching for a provided question and also does a smooth hand-off of the question to a human expert if none of the automated techniques can provide a confident answer. This system has been deployed across 675 internal enterprise IT support and maintenance projects.Comment: To appear in IAAI 201