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Neural entity linking models are very powerful, but run the risk of overfitting to the domain they are trained in. For this problem, a "domain" is characterized not just by genre of text but even by factors as specific as the particular distribution of entities, as neural models tend to overfit by memorizing properties of frequent entities in a dataset. We tackle the problem of building robust entity linking models that generalize effectively and do not rely on labeled entity linking data with a specific entity distribution. Rather than predicting entities directly, our approach models fine-grained entity properties, which can help disambiguate between even closely related entities. We derive a large inventory of types (tens of thousands) from Wikipedia categories, and use hyperlinked mentions in Wikipedia to distantly label data and train an entity typing model. At test time, we classify a mention with this typing model and use soft type predictions to link the mention to the most similar candidate entity. We evaluate our entity linking system on the CoNLL-YAGO dataset and show that our approach outperforms prior domain-independent entity linking systems. We also test our approach in a harder setting derived from the WikilinksNED dataset where all the mention-entity pairs are unseen during test time. Results indicate that our approach generalizes better than a state-of-the-art neural model on the dataset.
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Unsupervised Entity Linking with Guided Summarization and Multiple-Choice Selection
Entity linking, the task of linking potentially ambiguous mentions in texts to corresponding knowledge-base entities, is an important component for language understanding. We address two challenge in entity linking: how to leverage wider contexts surrounding a mention, and how to deal with limited training data. We propose a fully unsupervised model called SumMC that first generates a guided summary of the contexts conditioning on the mention, and then casts the task to a multiple-choice problem where the model chooses an entity from a list of candidates. In addition to evaluating our model on existing datasets that focus on named entities, we create a new dataset that links noun phrases from WikiHow to Wikidata. We show that our SumMC model achieves state-of-the-art unsupervised performance on our new dataset and on exiting datasets.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1928474
- PAR ID:
- 10390706
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Neural entity linking models are very powerful, but run the risk of overfitting to the domain they are trained in. For this problem, a “domain” is characterized not just by genre of text but even by factors as specific as the particular distribution of entities, as neural models tend to overfit by memorizing properties of frequent entities in a dataset. We tackle the problem of building robust entity linking models that generalize effectively and do not rely on labeled entity linking data with a specific entity distribution. Rather than predicting entities directly, our approach models fine-grained entity properties, which can help disambiguate between even closely related entities. We derive a large inventory of types (tens of thousands) from Wikipedia categories, and use hyperlinked mentions in Wikipedia to distantly label data and train an entity typing model. At test time, we classify a mention with this typing model and use soft type predictions to link the mention to the most similar candidate entity. We evaluate our entity linking system on the CoNLL-YAGO dataset (Hoffart et al. 2011) and show that our approach outperforms prior domain-independent entity linking systems. We also test our approach in a harder setting derived from the WikilinksNED dataset (Eshel et al. 2017) where all the mention-entity pairs are unseen during test time. Results indicate that our approach generalizes better than a state-of-the-art neural model on the dataset.more » « less
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