Consider the following problem: given a database of records indexed by names (e.g., name of companies, restaurants, businesses, or universities) and a new name, determine whether the new name is in the database, and if so, which record it refers to. This problem is an instance of record linkage problem and is a challenging problem because people do not consistently use the official name, but use abbreviations, synonyms, different order of terms, different spelling of terms, short form of terms, and the name can contain typos or spacing issues. We provide a probabilistic model using relational logistic regression to find the probability of each record in the database being the desired record for a given query and find the best record(s) with respect to the probabilities. Building on term-matching and translational approaches for search, our model addresses many of the aforementioned challenges and provides good results when existing baselines fail. Using the probabilities outputted by the model, we can automate the search process for a portion of queries whose desired documents get a probability higher than a trust threshold. We evaluate our model on a large real-world dataset from a telecommunications company and compare it to several state-of-the-art baselines. The obtained results show that our model is a promising probabilistic model for record linkage for names. We also test if the knowledge learned by our model on one domain can be effectively transferred to a new domain. For this purpose, we test our model on an unseen test set from the business names of the secondString dataset. Promising results show that our model can be effectively applied to unseen datasets. Finally, we study the sensitivity of our model to the statistics of datasets.
A classic approach for a text search problem is : matching exact terms in the query with those in records (or documents), weighting each term according to its importance. Well-known exact term matching algorithms are TFIDF @cite_26 and Okapi BM25 @cite_21 . An advantage of these approaches is that they are invariant to the change of order in the terms. However, due to not being able to handle abbreviations, short forms of names, typos, spacing issues, etc., these approaches fail on a portion of queries.
@cite_26 @cite_21
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The experimental evidence accumulated over the past 20 years indicates that textindexing systems based on the assignment of appropriately weighted single terms produce retrieval results that are superior to those obtainable with other more elaborate text representations. These results depend crucially on the choice of effective term weighting systems. This paper summarizes the insights gained in automatic term weighting, and provides baseline single term indexing models with which other more elaborate content analysis procedures can be compared. The Probabilistic Relevance Framework (PRF) is a formal framework for document retrieval, grounded in work done in the 1970-80s, which led to the development of one of the most successful text-retrieval algorithms, BM25. In recent years, research in the PRF has yielded new retrieval models capable of taking into account structure and link-graph information. Again, this has led to one of the most successful web-search and corporate-search algorithms, BM25F. The Probabilistic Relevance Framework: BM25 and Beyond presents the PRF from a conceptual point of view, describing the probabilistic modelling assumptions behind the framework and the different ranking algorithms that result from its application: the binary independence model, relevance feedback models, BM25, BM25F. Besides presenting a full derivation of the PRF ranking algorithms, it provides many insights about document retrieval in general, and points to many open challenges in this area. It also discusses the relation between the PRF and other statistical models for IR, and covers some related topics, such as the use of non-textual features, and parameter optimization for models with free parameters. The Probabilistic Relevance Framework: BM25 and Beyond is self-contained and accessible to anyone with basic knowledge of probability and inference.