Entity Relationship Explanation via Conceptualization

Abstract

© 2021, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.Finding an attribute to explain the relationships between a given pair of entities is valuable in many applications. However, many direct solutions fail, owing to its low precision caused by heavy dependence on text and low recall by evidence scarcity. Thus, we propose a generalization-and-inference framework and implement it to build a system: entity-relationship finder (ERF). Our main idea is conceptualizing entity pairs into proper concept pairs, as intermediate random variables to form the explanation. Although entity conceptualization has been studied, it has new challenges of collective optimization for multiple relationship instances, joint optimization for both entities, and aggregation of diluted observations into the head concepts defining the relationship. We propose conceptualization solutions and validate them as well as the framework with extensive experiments.