A Declarative Framework for Linking Entities

We introduce and develop a declarative framework for entity linking and, in particular, for entity resolution. As in some earlier approaches, our framework is based on a systematic use of constraints. However, the constraints we adopt are link-to-source constraints, unlike in earlier approaches where source-to-link constraints were used to dictate how to generate links. Our approach makes it possible to focus entirely on the intended properties of the outcome of entity linking, thus separating the constraints from any procedure of how to achieve that outcome. The core language consists of link-to-source constraints that specify the desired properties of a link relation in terms of source relations and built-in predicates such as similarity measures. A key feature of the link-to-source constraints is that they employ disjunction, which enables the declarative listing of all the reasons two entities should be linked. We also consider extensions of the core language that capture collective entity resolution by allowing interdependencies among the link relations. We identify a class of "good" solutions for entity-linking specifications, which we call maximum-value solutions and which capture the strength of a link by counting the reasons that justify it. We study natural algorithmic problems associated with these solutions, including the problem of enumerating the "good" solutions and the problem of finding the certain links, which are the links that appear in every "good" solution. We show that these problems are tractable for the core language but may become intractable once we allow interdependencies among the link relations. We also make some surprising connections between our declarative framework, which is deterministic, and probabilistic approaches such as ones based on Markov Logic Networks.