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Software Maps Ambiguous Names in Texts to the Right Person


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A new technique queries documents by means of keywords, entities, and categories.

The AIDA software uses Wikipedia to help accurately disambiguate named entities.

Credit: Johannes Hoffart/MPI

Max Planck Institute for Informatics researchers have developed AIDA, software that enables accurate disambiguation of named entities by analyzing them with the help of Wikipedia.

AIDA establishes connections between mentions in the Wikipedia text and potential persons or places. "The more references exist between a mention and a specific person in Wikipedia, the more words of the person's Wikipedia article can also be found in the input text, and the higher the score the mention-entity edge receives," says Max Planck researcher Johannes Hoffart. AIDA then checks this score and picks the mention-entity edge with the highest score as the correct mapping.

The researchers have implemented a search engine based on their approach that makes it possible to combine the search for strings with the search for specific objects such as persons and locations, and to search on categories. "With our new technique we can not only build better search engines, but also make computers understand texts almost as a human does, in an efficient way," says Max Planck researcher Gerhard Weikum.

From Saarland University
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Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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