(Almost) All of Entity Resolution
This is an incremental review article that synthesizes existing knowledge on entity resolution for applications in areas such as human rights, statistics, and medicine.
The paper reviews the field of entity resolution, covering its historical development from foundational work in the 1940s-50s to modern methods like probabilistic record linkage, clustering, and supervised techniques, and discusses current research topics.
Whether the goal is to estimate the number of people that live in a congressional district, to estimate the number of individuals that have died in an armed conflict, or to disambiguate individual authors using bibliographic data, all these applications have a common theme - integrating information from multiple sources. Before such questions can be answered, databases must be cleaned and integrated in a systematic and accurate way, commonly known as record linkage, de-duplication, or entity resolution. In this article, we review motivational applications and seminal papers that have led to the growth of this area. Specifically, we review the foundational work that began in the 1940's and 50's that have led to modern probabilistic record linkage. We review clustering approaches to entity resolution, semi- and fully supervised methods, and canonicalization, which are being used throughout industry and academia in applications such as human rights, official statistics, medicine, citation networks, among others. Finally, we discuss current research topics of practical importance.