Identification of Alias Links among Participants in Narratives

Sangameshwar Patil, Sachin Pawar, Swapnil Hingmire, Girish Palshikar, Vasudeva Varma, Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Identification of distinct and independent participants (entities of interest) in a narrative is an important task for many NLP applications. This task becomes challenging because these participants are often referred to using multiple aliases. In this paper, we propose an approach based on linguistic knowledge for identification of aliases mentioned using proper nouns, pronouns or noun phrases with common noun headword. We use Markov Logic Network (MLN) to encode the linguistic knowledge for identification of aliases. We evaluate on four diverse history narratives of varying complexity. Our approach performs better than the state-of-the-art approach as well as a combination of standard named entity recognition and coreference resolution techniques.