  Collective entity disambiguation aims to jointly resolve multiple mentions by
linking them to their associated entities in a knowledge base. Previous works
are primarily based on the underlying assumption that entities within the same
document are highly related. However, the extend to which these mentioned
entities are actually connected in reality is rarely studied and therefore
raises interesting research questions. For the first time, we show that the
semantic relationships between the mentioned entities are in fact less dense
than expected. This could be attributed to several reasons such as noise, data
sparsity and knowledge base incompleteness. As a remedy, we introduce MINTREE,
a new tree-based objective for the entity disambiguation problem. The key
intuition behind MINTREE is the concept of coherence relaxation which utilizes
the weight of a minimum spanning tree to measure the coherence between
entities. Based on this new objective, we design a novel entity disambiguation
algorithms which we call Pair-Linking. Instead of considering all the given
mentions, Pair-Linking iteratively selects a pair with the highest confidence
at each step for decision making. Via extensive experiments, we show that our
approach is not only more accurate but also surprisingly faster than many
state-of-the-art collective linking algorithms.
