Entity Identification and Extraction related to a Specific Event

Mariya Quibtiya

Final Project Report for Web Information Systems Class [CS475/675], Fall 2011
Instructor: Amit Sheth [1]
GTA: Ajith Ranabahu [2]
Mentors: Lu Chen [3] and Hemant Purohit [4]

Introduction

This work on Entity Identification and Classification focuses primarily on the identification of Proper names relevant to a specific event in a collection of tweets from Twitter, and then classifying them into a set of pre-defined categories of interest such as:

• Person names (names of people)
• Organization names (companies, government organizations, committees, etc.)
• Location names (cities, countries etc.)
• Miscellaneous names (such as, a specific date – 9/11, a facility – such as “Lokpal Bill”, time, monetary expressions, etc.)

Since the advent of social media, we can find greater and greater involvement of people on various events happening all across the world. In the process, people talk about a number of entities related to a specific event on social media; and analysts want to have a deeper insight with respect to ‘what’ people are talking and ‘about whom’ they are talking. In order to know about the prominent entities in a particular event and the polarity of sentiments of people associated with those entities, with the future aim of knowing the influential entities related to a particular event - Identification and Classification of entities should be done in a very precise manner, and hence, in an unstructured context of tweets, the task of “Automated and Relevant Entity Extraction” becomes a challenging yet desirable task.

Though the use of automated entity extraction methods leads to the spotting of many spurious entities which are quite irrelevant to the context or the specific event, yet it helps in the real-time evaluation of events. A new, but very prominent entity may emerge at any point of time and need to be recognized, especially on social media which might influence many people or some very critical issues. Thus, the importance of automated entity extraction cannot be overlooked. The corpus may contain the mentions of many entities or nouns, but some of the entities mentioned in the tweets may not always relate to the event that we are focusing upon. For example, “Anna Hazare” mentioned in the tweets would relate to the event “India against Corruption” , but “Anna Calvi” or “Anna Wintour” or “Anna Fischer” are not related to the same. So, apart from identifying the proper names in a given corpus, it is also important to disambiguate the entities with respect to their relevance with a particular event. That is, we need to chop-off entities like “Anna Calvi” if we are talking about “India against Corruption”. Moreover since we are working upon unstructured corpus, it is not necessary that people always follow a structured pattern , like using Capital letters or writing names accurately or using abbreviated or first/last names only. So, we also need to capture the fact that “Anna”, “AnnaHazare”, “annahazare”, ”hazare” all relate to the same entity “Anna Hazare”.

We begin with a collection of some tweets on a particular event. Then, using the approaches described below, we would keep on enhancing our candidate sets unless we arrive at some concrete list of entities relevant to the context without redundancy and spurious names. Firstly, we try to capture the names of all the entities mentioned in the corpus, and then gradually improve the accuracy to get the desired set of topmost entities that people are interested in.

Approaches

We used the following approaches for getting the candidate set of entities from the tweet corpus:

• Querying the DBPedia with extracted noun phrases: We randomly selected 1000 tweets per event for two events, namely “India against Corruption” and “Royal Wedding”. We then pre-processed the tweets to remove some noise, like making the input free from hash tags, mentions and url’s. Then, we used the sentence splitter to split every tweet into the constituting sentences and then used the Stanford Parser to parse the sentences with different parts of speech tags, and finally collected all the noun-phrases occurring in the entire corpus. But these extracted noun-phrases also contained many undesirable words like complaints, tricks, growth and similar abstract nouns. In order to remove these, we used a short dictionary containing a list of commonly used abstract nouns. Apart from using the dictionary, we also followed an additional linguistic heuristic approach for removing such words – if a noun phrase begins more that 80% times with a small letter, it is less probable of being a proper noun and therefore, less probable of being an entity. Using the above two approaches, we were able to remove most of the undesirable abstract words from our candidate sets. Next, we used the DBPedia Sparql Endpoint to query whether a particular noun-phrase or part of the phrase is an entity or not. For this, we used the subclass of the main class “Thing” and an rdf-query to get the results. Though it could annotate many of the entities correctly, but it had few limitations. Firstly, we had to input the noun-phrase using the word exactly as it appears in its dictionary, i.e. it could figure out that “Anna Hazare” is the name of a person, but it did not show any results if we just give “Anna” as an input. Secondly, the DBpedia is not updated frequently, so it may not give results for many of the emerging entities.
  
  
• Using Alchemy API- based approach: Since, DBPedia does not give a high precision result, we followed another approach of using the Alchemy API. Since, all these API-based approaches always have some upper limit on the number of hits per day that we can query, we dumped the entire corpus in a text file after the pre-processing step and provided the entire text file as an input to the Alchemy API. This not only reduces the number of hits as compared to providing a single tweet at a time, but also enhances the results by providing some context support. We considered four parameters in the results obtained – name/text that identifies the entity, its type, its frequency in the corpus and its relevance score. Though it could figure out entities very precisely from the corpus, but some results were still to be filtered and needed some improvement. Firstly, it included all the names such as “Anna Wintour”, “Anna Calvi” with a comparatively high relevance score of more than 0.49 on a 0-1 scale; even if it was not relevant to the specified event “India against Corruption”. Secondly, it also considered “Jan Lokpal” and “Jan Lokpal Bill” as two different entities. Thirdly, it was not able to determine the type of few entities correctly, such as it associated the type “Person” to the entity “Jan Lokpal Bill”, which should be put under the type “Facility”.
  
  
• Wikipedia-based Approach : Since, the above two approaches also included entities that were not relevant to the context; we still needed some filtering mechanism to attain higher precision. Thus, we used Wikipedia-based knowledge approach for getting higher relevance.
  We selected top 3 Wikipedia pages from Google-search related to a specific event and obtained all the entities with one-hop relationships. Using this set along with the set of top n-grams, we obtained relevant key-terms from every tweet. In this way, we created a bigger set for comparison with our candidate lists obtained: i) noun-phrases ii) from DBPedia-querying iii) from Alchemy API.
  

The final step was grouping the similar entities together and figuring out the topmost entities talked about. For this, we experimented with 20 types of similarity measures and finally selected two of them that gave a fairly good performance-“QGramsDistance similarity measure with a threshold of 0.75” and “Jaro Similarity with a threshold of 0.8”. QGramsDistance gave the best results, but a little extra grouping was needed that was sufficed by the Jaro similarity measure. Thus, based on the frequency and the above two similarity measures, we were able to obtain the final list of topmost 10 entities(along with their groups of similar strings) talked about.

Experiments

We randomly selected around 1000 tweets for the event “India against Corruption” and then worked upon identifying and extracting the names of the relevant entities mentioned in the collected set of tweets. We did not consider re-tweets in our case. After pre-processing and parsing every tweet, we first obtained a list of about 1055 noun phrases along with their frequencies of occurrence in the collected corpus. This was the first preliminary candidate set obtained (from which we had to specifically extract entities of relevance). Since, we focused on identifying the topmost frequent entities of influence that people talk about in the event, we removed all those phrases that had frequency ‘1’. This gave us a list of about 232 noun phrases, which was further reduced by removing some abstract nouns or the nouns that begin with a small letter for more than 80% times it was mentioned in the corpus. This gave us a candidate set of 171 noun phrases. But, this list had to be refined further, as it had few names that were not related to the specified event, as well as different phrases that point to the same entity such as “Anna”, “Hazare”, “Anna Hazare” – all point to the single entity “Anna Hazare”. Similarly, “Janlokpal” and “Janlokpal Bill” are the same.

• We queried DBPedia endpoint with every phrase (also queried by splitting the phrase, if it did not give any results, to obtain the words that may qualify for an entity in a phrase) and obtained a list of 53 entities along with their types, out of which only 23 were relevant.
• Providing the entire tweet corpus to the Alchemy API gave 32 entities along with their frequencies, type and relevance scores. Out of this 12 were relevant.
• We obtained 87 entities by comparison of the noun phrases from the Wikipedia-obtained set, out of which 45 were relevant.

We found that comparison of all the initial candidate-elements with the Wikipedia-obtained set assisted in removing most of the irrelevant and out-of-context entities from our candidate lists:

Figure 1: Percentage of irrelevant entities removed by different methods.

Based on the primary evaluation of our candidate sets, we obtained the following Precision and Recall [Total number of relevant entities present in the collected corpus = 63] scores for the different approaches used:

Figure 2: Precision, Recall and F-measures for different methods.

In all the above three cases, on comparing the Precision scores with and without using the Wikipedia as a knowledge base, we can clearly find that the use of a knowledge-base enhances the precision-scores and helped in removing most of the irrelevancies and spurious entities from the candidate list.

But, though Alchemy API based approach gave us a maximum precision score of 0.692, we preferred using the noun-phrases directly to obtain the candidate set, based on the frequencies of their occurrence. This is because the other two approaches (i.e. DBPedia-based and Alchemy-based) gave lower F-measures. Moreover, with bigger data-sets we might face the limitation on the number of hits per day.

Conclusion and Future Work

In this project, we tried to identify and extract different entities (primarily the proper nouns) mentioned in an unstructured corpus collected from “Twitter” on a particular event and followed three approaches for getting the desired results. We found that using Wikipedia as a knowledge-base, gave us the best results for figuring out the topmost relevant entities occurring more frequently in the corpus. Also, as the APIs always have some limits on the number of hits per day, we could directly use the candidate set of noun-phrases with Wikipedia-based approach to get the most precise results. We would extend the work to Target-specific sentiment analysis to know the polarity of sentiments associated with the prominent entities in an event, i.e. to know “what people think” about a particular entity. Also, we would try to implement the above work for real-time analysis of a particular event on Twitris to know the influential entities in an event and the way they influence people on social media.

References

• “Personal Entity Extraction Filtering using Data Stores” by Kemp Williams, Frankie Patman

• “Exploiting Dictionaries in Named Entity Extraction: Combining Semi-Markov Extraction Processes and Data Integration Methods” by William W. Cohen and Sunita Sarawagi