Interactive Ambiguity Resolution of Named Entities in Fictional Literature

• Published in: Computer graphics forum Vol. 36; no. 3; pp. 189 - 200
• Main Authors: Stoffel, Florian, Jentner, Wolfgang, Behrisch, Michael, Fuchs, Johannes, Keim, Daniel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2017
• Subjects: Ambiguity; Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS); Fiction; H.5.2 [Computer Graphics]: Information Interfaces and Presentation—Graphical user interfaces; I.7.m [Document and Text Processing]: Miscellaneous; Iterative methods; J.5 [Computer Applications]: Arts and Humanities—Literature; Post-production processing; Recognition; Software; State of the art; Unstructured data
• DOI: 10.1111/cgf.13179
• ISSN: 0167-7055

Named entity recognition (NER) denotes the task to detect entities and their corresponding classes, such as person or location, in unstructured text data. For most applications, state of the art NER software is producing reasonable results. However, as a consequence of the methodological limitations and the well‐known pitfalls when analyzing natural language data, the NER results are likely to contain ambiguities. In this paper, we present an interactive NER ambiguity resolution technique, which enables users to create (post‐processing) rules for named entity recognition data based on the content and entity context of the analyzed documents. We specifically address the problem that in use‐cases where ambiguities are problematic, such as the attribution of fictional characters with traits, it is often unfeasible to train models on custom data to improve state of the art NER software. We derive an iterative process model for improving NER results, show an interactive NER ambiguity resolution prototype, illustrate our approach with contemporary literature, and discuss our work and future research.