Active instance matching with pairwise constraints and its application to Chinese knowledge base construction

摘要

Instance matching is the problem of determining whether two instances describe the same real-world entity or not. Instance matching plays a key role in data integration and data cleansing, especially for building a knowledge base. For example, we can regard each article in encyclopedias as an instance, and a group of articles which refers to the same real-world object as an entity. Therefore, articles about Washington should be distinguished and grouped into different entities such as Washington, D.C (the capital of the USA), George Washington (first president of the USA), Washington (a state of the USA), Washington (a village in West Sussex, England), Washington F.C. (a football club based in Washington, Tyne and Wear, England), Washington, D.C. (a novel). In this paper, we proposed a novel instance matching approach Active Instance Matching with Pairwise Constraints, which can bring the human into the loop of instance matching. The proposed approach can generate candidate pairs in advance to reduce the computational complexity, and then iteratively select the most informative pairs according to the uncertainty, influence, connectivity and diversity of pairs. We evaluated our approach one two publicly available datasets AMINER and WIDE-NUS and then applied our approach to the two large-scale real-world datasets, Baidu Baike and Hudong Baike, to build a Chinese knowledge base. The experiments and practice illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.