Finding "Similar" Concepts with Evidences across Different Feature Vector Spaces
Yating Zhang, Adam Jatowt, Katsumi Tanaka · 2016
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there is an often quoted opening sentence of a famous novel by L. Hartley entitled Go Between. It emphasizes the well-known observation that it is often difficult to understand entities, concepts and their context in the past, especially, in the distant past. Even though some professionals, common sense or just our intuition might suggest that certain entities may be similar across time, still, usually, we lack convincing and concrete evidence to support similarity estimation. For example, it may not be immediately obvious why Walkman in 1980s is considered to be a similar entity to iPod. However, we can easily understand their similarity when learning that both were dominant, portable music devices in their corresponding times. In this paper, we propose to automatically detect evidences to explain similarities and differences between entities in different time periods. For a given input entity we first output the ranked list of candidate counterparts and then we detect supporting evidence to explain why the results are similar or different to the input entity. The evidences our method generates should be relevant to entities, cover their diverse and important aspects and allow for easy comparison. Keyword Evidence Finding, Similarity Searching, Difference Searching, Entity Comparison