Context-aware Entity Morph Decoding

Boliang Zhang, Hongzhao Huang, Xiaoman Pan, Sujian Li, Chin-Yew Lin, Heng Ji, Kevin Knight, Zhen Wen, Yizhou Sun, Jiawei Han, Bulent Yener


Abstract

People create morphs, a special type of fake alternative names, to achieve certain communication goals such as expressing strong sentiment or evading censors. For example, ``Black Mamba", the name for a highly venomous snake, is a morph Kobe Bryant created for himself due to his agility and aggressiveness in playing basketball games. This paper presents the first end-to-end context-aware entity morph decoding system that can automatically identify, disambiguate, verify morph mentions based on specific contexts, and resolve them to target entities. Our approach is based on an absolute ``cold-start" - it does not require any candidate morph or target entity lists as input, nor any manually constructed morph-target pairs for training. We design a semi-supervised collective inference framework for morph mention extraction, and compare various deep learning based approaches for morph resolution. Our approach achieved significant improvement over the state-of-the-art method (Huang et al., 2013) which used a large amount of training data.