Scalable and Domain-Independent Entity Coreference: Establishing High Quality Data Linkages across Heterogeneous Data Sources

Due to the decentralized nature of the Semantic Web, the same real world entity may be described in various data sources and assigned syntactically distinct identifiers. In order to facilitate data utilization in the Semantic Web, without compromising the freedom of people to publish their data, one critical problem is to appropriately interlink such heterogeneous data. This interlinking process can also be referred to as

Entity Coreference

, i.e., finding which identifiers refer to the same real world entity. This proposal will investigate algorithms to solve this entity coreference problem in the Semantic Web in several aspects. The essence of entity coreference is to compute the similarity of instance pairs. Given the diversity of domains of existing datasets, it is important that an entity coreference algorithm be able to achieve good precision and recall across domains represented in various ways. Furthermore, in order to scale to large datasets, an algorithm should be able to intelligently select what information to utilize for comparison and determine whether to compare a pair of instances to reduce the overall complexity. Finally, appropriate evaluation strategies need to be chosen to verify the effectiveness of the algorithms.