English

Unsupervised Methods for Determining Object and Relation Synonyms on the Web

Computation and Language 2014-01-23 v1

Abstract

The task of identifying synonymous relations and objects, or synonym resolution, is critical for high-quality information extraction. This paper investigates synonym resolution in the context of unsupervised information extraction, where neither hand-tagged training examples nor domain knowledge is available. The paper presents a scalable, fully-implemented system that runs in O(KN log N) time in the number of extractions, N, and the maximum number of synonyms per word, K. The system, called Resolver, introduces a probabilistic relational model for predicting whether two strings are co-referential based on the similarity of the assertions containing them. On a set of two million assertions extracted from the Web, Resolver resolves objects with 78% precision and 68% recall, and resolves relations with 90% precision and 35% recall. Several variations of resolvers probabilistic model are explored, and experiments demonstrate that under appropriate conditions these variations can improve F1 by 5%. An extension to the basic Resolver system allows it to handle polysemous names with 97% precision and 95% recall on a data set from the TREC corpus.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1401.5696,
  title  = {Unsupervised Methods for Determining Object and Relation Synonyms on the Web},
  author = {Alexander Pieter Yates and Oren Etzioni},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.5696},
  year   = {2014}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T02:52:20.009Z