Assessing Confidence of Knowledge Base Content with an Experimental Study in Entity Resolution

The purpose of this paper is to begin a conversation about the importance and role of confidence estimation in knowledge bases (KBs). KBs are never perfectly accurate, yet without confidence reporting their users are likely to treat them as if they were, possibly with serious real-world consequences. We define a notion of confidence based on the probability of a KB fact being true. For automatically constructed KBs we propose several algorithms for estimating this confidence from pre-existing probabilistic models of data integration and KB construction. In particular, this paper focusses on confidence estimation in entity resolution. A goal of our exposition here is to encourage creators and curators of KBs to include confidence estimates for entities and relations in their KBs.