PathEL: A novel collective entity linking method based on relationship paths in heterogeneous information networks

Collective entity linking always outperforms independent entity linking because it considers the interdependencies among entities. However, the existing collective entity linking methods often have high time complexity, do not fully utilize the relationship information in heterogeneous information networks (HIN) and most of them are largely dependent on the special features associated with Wikipedia. Based on the above problems, this paper proposes a novel collective entity linking method based on relationship path in heterogeneous information networks (PathEL). The PathEL classifies complex relationships in HIN into 1-hop paths and 3 types of 2-hop paths, and measures entity correlation by the path information among entities, ultimately combining textual semantic information to realize collective entity linking. In addition, facing the high complexity of collective entity linking, this paper proposes to solve the problem by combining the variable sliding window data processing method and the two-step pruning strategy. The variable sliding window data processing method limits the number of entity mentions in each window and the pruning strategy reduces the number of candidate entities. Finally, the experimental results of three benchmark datasets verify that the model proposed in this paper performs better in entity linking than the baseline models. On the AIDA CoNLL dataset, compared to the second-ranked model, our model has improved P, R, and F1 scores by 1.61%, 1.54%, and 1.57%, respectively.