creators_name: Chaudhuri, Surajit creators_name: Ganti, Venkatesh creators_name: Xin, Dong type: conference_item datestamp: 2009-04-06 19:08:51 lastmod: 2009-04-14 04:37:05 metadata_visibility: show title: Exploiting Web Search to Generate Synonyms for Entities ispublished: pub full_text_status: public pres_type: paper abstract: 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 pagerange: 151-151 event_title: 18th International World Wide Web Conference event_location: Madrid, Spain event_dates: April 20th-24th, 2009 event_type: conference refereed: TRUE citation: 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. document_url: http://www2009.eprints.org/16/1/p151.pdf