Robust Entity Clustering Via Phylogenetic Inference

Entity clustering must determine when two named-entity mentions refer to the same entity. Typical approaches use a pipeline architecture that clusters the mentions using fixed or learned measures of name and context similarity. In this paper, we propose a model for cross-document coreference resolution that achieves robustness by learning similarity from unlabeled data. The generative process assumes that each entity mention arises from copying and optionally mutating an earlier name from a similar context. Clustering the mentions into entities depends on recovering this copying tree jointly with estimating models of the mutation process and parent selection process. We present a block Gibbs sampler for posterior inference and an empirical evaluation on several datasets.