EgoSet: Exploiting Word Ego-networks and User-generated Ontology for Multifaceted Set Expansion

A key challenge of entity set expansion is that multifaceted input seeds can lead to significant incoherence in the result set. In this paper, we present a novel solution to handling multifaceted seeds by combining existing user-generated ontologies with a novel word-similarity metric based on skip-grams. By blending the two resources we are able to produce sparse word ego-networks that are centered on the seed terms and are able to capture semantic equivalence among words. We demonstrate that the resulting networks possess internally-coherent clusters, which can be exploited to provide non-overlapping expansions, in order to reflect different semantic classes of the seeds. Empirical evaluation against state-of-the-art baselines shows that our solution, EgoSet, is able to not only capture multiple facets in the input query, but also generate expansions for each facet with higher precision.