Entity Type Recognition for Heterogeneous Semantic Graphs

We describe an approach to reducing the computational cost of identifying coreferent instances in heterogeneous semantic graphs where the underlying ontologies may not be informative or even known. The problem is similar to coreference resolution in unstructured text, where a variety of linguistic clues and contextual information is used to infer entity types and predict coreference. Semantic graphs, whether in RDF or another formalism, are semi-structured data with very different contextual clues and need different approaches to identify potentially coreferent entities. When their ontologies are unknown, inaccessible or semantically trivial, coreference resolution is difficult. For such cases, we can use supervised machine learning to map entity attributes via dictionaries based on properties from an appropriate background knowledge base to predict instance entity types, aiding coreference resolution. We evaluated the approach in experiments on data from Wikipedia, Freebase and Arnetminer and DBpedia as the background knowledge base.