Finding Person Relations in Image Data of the Internet Archive

The multimedia content in the World Wide Web is rapidly growing and contains valuable information for many applications in different domains. For this reason, the Internet Archive initiative has been gathering billions of time-versioned web pages since the mid-nineties. However, the huge amount of data is rarely labeled with appropriate metadata and automatic approaches are required to enable semantic search. Normally, the textual content of the Internet Archive is used to extract entities and their possible relations across domains such as politics and entertainment, whereas image and video content is usually neglected. In this paper, we introduce a system for person recognition in image content of web news stored in the Internet Archive. Thus, the system complements entity recognition in text and allows researchers and analysts to track media coverage and relations of persons more precisely. Based on a deep learning face recognition approach, we suggest a system that automatically detects persons of interest and gathers sample material, which is subsequently used to identify them in the image data of the Internet Archive. We evaluate the performance of the face recognition system on an appropriate standard benchmark dataset and demonstrate the feasibility of the approach with two use cases

Probabilistic Bag-Of-Hyperlinks Model for Entity Linking

Many fundamental problems in natural language processing rely on determining what entities appear in a given text. Commonly referenced as entity linking, this step is a fundamental component of many NLP tasks such as text understanding, automatic summarization, semantic search or machine translation. Name ambiguity, word polysemy, context dependencies and a heavy-tailed distribution of entities contribute to the complexity of this problem. We here propose a probabilistic approach that makes use of an effective graphical model to perform collective entity disambiguation. Input mentions (i.e.,~linkable token spans) are disambiguated jointly across an entire document by combining a document-level prior of entity co-occurrences with local information captured from mentions and their surrounding context. The model is based on simple sufficient statistics extracted from data, thus relying on few parameters to be learned. Our method does not require extensive feature engineering, nor an expensive training procedure. We use loopy belief propagation to perform approximate inference. The low complexity of our model makes this step sufficiently fast for real-time usage. We demonstrate the accuracy of our approach on a wide range of benchmark datasets, showing that it matches, and in many cases outperforms, existing state-of-the-art methods