Expressive Power of Entity-Linking Frameworks

We develop a unifying approach to declarative entity linking by introducing the notion of an entity linking framework and an accompanying notion of the certain links in such a framework. In an entity linking framework, logic-based constraints are used to express properties of the desired link relations in terms of source relations and, possibly, in terms of other link relations. The definition of the certain links in such a framework makes use of weighted repairs and consistent answers in inconsistent databases. We demonstrate the modeling capabilities of this approach by showing that numerous concrete entity linking scenarios can be cast as such entity linking frameworks for suitable choices of constraints and weights. By using the certain links as a measure of expressive power, we investigate the relative expressive power of several entity linking frameworks and obtain sharp comparisons. In particular, we show that we gain expressive power if we allow constraints that capture non-recursive collective entity resolution, where link relations may depend on other link relations (and not just on source relations). Moreover, we show that an increase in expressive power also takes place when we allow constraints that incorporate preferences as an additional mechanism for expressing "goodness" of links.