Using Feature Conjunctions Across Examples for Learning Pairwise Classifiers

We propose a kernel method for using combinations of features across example pairs in learning pairwise classifiers. Identifying two instances in the same class is an important technique in duplicate detection, entity matching, and other clustering problems. However, it is a difficult problem when instances have few discriminative features. One typical example is to check whether two abbreviated author names in different papers refer to the same person or not. While using combinations of different features from each instance may improve the classification accuracy, doing this straightforwardly is computationally intensive. Our method uses interaction between different features without high computational cost using a kernel. At medium recall levels, this method can give a precision 4 to 8 times higher than that of previous methods in author matching problems.