Structured Databases of Named Entities from Bayesian Nonparametrics

Jacob Eisenstein, Tae Yano, William W. Cohen, Noah A. Smith, Eric P. Xing

Abstract: We present a nonparametric Bayesian approach to extract a structured database of entities from text. Neither the number of entities nor the fields that characterize each entity are provided in advance; the only supervision is a set of five prototype examples. Our method jointly accomplishes three tasks: (i) identifying a set of canonical entities, (ii) inferring a schema for the fields that describe each entity, and (iii) matching entities to their references in raw text. Empirical evaluation shows that the approach learns an accurate database of entities and a sensible model of name structure.