title: Exploiting Web Search to Generate Synonyms for Entities creator: Chaudhuri, Surajit creator: Ganti, Venkatesh creator: Xin, Dong description: Tasks recognizing named entities such as products, people names, or locations from documents have recently received significant attention in the literature. Many solutions to these tasks assume the existence of reference entity tables. An important challenge that needs to be addressed in the entity extraction task is that of ascertaining whether or not a candidate string approximately matches with a named entity in a given reference table. Prior approaches have relied on string-based similarity which only compare a candidate string and an entity it matches with. In this paper, we exploit web search engines in order to define new similarity functions. We then develop efficient techniques to facilitate approximate matching in the context of our proposed similarity functions. In an extensive experimental evaluation, we demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our techniques. date: 2009-04 type: Conference or Workshop Item type: PeerReviewed format: application/pdf identifier: http://www2009.eprints.org/16/1/p151.pdf identifier: Chaudhuri, Surajit and Ganti, Venkatesh and Xin, Dong (2009) Exploiting Web Search to Generate Synonyms for Entities. In: 18th International World Wide Web Conference, April 20th-24th, 2009, Madrid, Spain. relation: http://www2009.eprints.org/16/