HEEL: exploratory entity linking for heterogeneous information networks

A heterogeneous information network (HIN) is a ubiquitous data model, consisting of multiple types of entities and relations. Names of entities in HINs are inherently ambiguous, making it difficult to fully disambiguate a HIN. In this paper, we introduce the task of exploratory entity linking for HINs. Given a partially disambiguated HIN, we aim at linking ambiguous names to disambiguated entities in the HIN if their referent entities are present. We also try to “explore” other alternatives by discovering new entities and adding them to the HIN. A partial classification EM-based approach is proposed to address this task. We present a constrained probability propagation model to link surface names to entities in the HIN. New entity detection process is modeled as a maximum edge weight clique problem. Experiments illustrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for entity linking with HINs and author name disambiguation.