Extending Wikification: Nominal discovery, nominal linking, and the grounding of nouns
Liangwei Chen · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2017
Mention discovery, entity linking, and grounding are crucial steps in natural language understanding. Compared with named entities, the detection and linking of nominals are relatively little studied but essential since the grounding of nouns enriches information for humans that read documents. In this thesis, we address those problems by extending the Illinois Cross-lingual Wikifier with nominal linking and sense disambiguation. We train a nominal detector with the dictionary post-process to discover nominal mentions and classify them into predefined type categories. For the nominal linking, we propose a co-reference model that captures the pairwise features between the named entity and the nominal, and we integrate it with several linking heuristics. Finally, we ground nouns to their Wikipedia titles by adjusting the ranker of the Wikifier with extra features and the training on common nouns. Our proposed approaches show competitive performances on the benchmark datasets.