NPEL: Neural Paired Entity Linking in Web Tables

This paper studies entity linking (EL) in Web tables, which aims to link the string mentions in table cells to their referent entities in a knowledge base. Two main problems exist in previous studies: 1) contextual information is not well utilized in mention-entity similarity computation; 2) the assumption on entity coherence that all entities in the same row or column are highly related to each other is not always correct. In this paper, we propose NPEL, a new Neural Paired Entity Linking framework, to overcome the above problems. In NPEL, we design a deep learning model with different neural networks and an attention mechanism, to model different kinds of contextual information of mentions and entities, for mention-entity similarity computation in Web tables. NPEL also relaxes the above assumption on entity coherence by a new paired entity linking algorithm, which iteratively selects two mentions with the highest confidence for EL. Experiments on real-world datasets exhibit that NPEL has the best performance compared with state-of-the-art baselines in different evaluation metrics.