Optimal Transport-based Alignment of Learned Character Representations for String Similarity

Derek Tam, Nicholas Monath, Ari Kobren, Aaron Traylor, Rajarshi Das, Andrew McCallum


Abstract
String similarity models are vital for record linkage, entity resolution, and search. In this work, we present STANCE–a learned model for computing the similarity of two strings. Our approach encodes the characters of each string, aligns the encodings using Sinkhorn Iteration (alignment is posed as an instance of optimal transport) and scores the alignment with a convolutional neural network. We evaluate STANCE’s ability to detect whether two strings can refer to the same entity–a task we term alias detection. We construct five new alias detection datasets (and make them publicly available). We show that STANCE (or one of its variants) outperforms both state-of-the-art and classic, parameter-free similarity models on four of the five datasets. We also demonstrate STANCE’s ability to improve downstream tasks by applying it to an instance of cross-document coreference and show that it leads to a 2.8 point improvement in Bˆ3 F1 over the previous state-of-the-art approach.
Anthology ID:
P19-1592
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5907–5917
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1592
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1592
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Derek Tam, Nicholas Monath, Ari Kobren, Aaron Traylor, Rajarshi Das, and Andrew McCallum. 2019. Optimal Transport-based Alignment of Learned Character Representations for String Similarity. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5907–5917, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Optimal Transport-based Alignment of Learned Character Representations for String Similarity (Tam et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1592.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1592.mp4
Code
 iesl/stance