TERMS: Text Extraction from Redundant and Multiple Sources

In this work we present our approach to the identity resolution problem: discovering references to one and the same object that come from different sources. Solving this problem is important for a number of different communities (e.g. Database, NLP and Semantic Web) that process heterogeneous data where variations of the same objects are referenced in different formats (e.g. textual documents, web pages, database records, ontologies etc.). Identity resolution aims at creating a single view into the data where different facts are interlinked and incompleteness is remedied.

We propose a four-step approach that starts with schema alignment of incoming data sources. As a second step - candidate selection - we discard those entities that are totally different from those that they are compared to. Next the main evidence for identity of two entities comes from applying similarity measures comparing their attribute
values. The last step in the identity resolution process is data fusion or merging entities found to be identical into a single object.

The principal novel contribution of our solution is the use of a rich semantic knowledge representation that allows for flexible and unified interpretation during the resolution process. Thus we are not restricted in the type of information that can be processed (although we have focussed our work on problems relating to information extracted from text). We report the implementation of these four steps in an IDentity Resolution Framework (IDRF) and their application to two use-cases. We propose a rule based approach for customisation in each step and introduce logical operators and their interpretation during the process. Our final evaluation shows that this approach facilitates high accuracy in resolving identity.