Rbalasub writeup of Poon and Domingos

A review of Poon_2007_joint_inference_in_information_extraction by user:rbalasub

The authors approach doing a joint inference over all examples and all stages of an IE system using Markov Logic Networks. In the this paper they specifically address citation matching and do joint segmentation and entity resolution. The use of the MC-SAT algorithm in the Markov Logic Network framework works well and beats baselines where the two steps are done in a pipelined manner.

It's intriguing to see joint inference techniques work well since intuitively they ought to do better but traditionally have been expensive. The development of newer sophisticated techniques such as this and the ILP approach by Roth et al. makes it computationally feasible.