GraphER: Token-Centric Entity Resolution with Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

2020-06-02

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34

Volume

Vol. 34 No. 05: AAAI-20 Technical Tracks 5

AAAI Technical Track: Natural Language Processing

Entity resolution (ER) aims to identify entity records that refer to the same real-world entity, which is a critical problem in data cleaning and integration. Most of the existing models are attribute-centric, that is, matching entity pairs by comparing similarities of pre-aligned attributes, which require the schemas of records to be identical and are too coarse-grained to capture subtle key information within a single attribute. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based ER model GraphER. Our model is token-centric: the final matching results are generated by directly aggregating token-level comparison features, in which both the semantic and structural information has been softly embedded into token embeddings by training an Entity Record Graph Convolutional Network (ER-GCN). To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first effort to do token-centric entity resolution with the help of GCN in entity resolution task. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our model stably outperforms state-of-the-art models.

10.1609/aaai.v34i05.6330