Unaligned Message-Passing and Contextualized-Pretraining for Robust Geo-Entity Resolution

Geo-entity resolution involves linking records that refer to the same entities across different spatial datasets, which underpins location-based services. Given the varying quality of geo-data, this task is known to be challenging, as directly comparing the semantic-centric representations of two entities is no longer reliable. To robustify geo-entity resolution in this context, the main research question is how to effectively extend the current semantics-centric representations of geo-entity with geographical context from its spatial neighbors. Existing methods consider names from neighbors, but they struggle to fully utilize the unaligned neighbor attributes. In this paper, we study the representation of geo-context for robust geo-entity resolution and propose two adaptations that efficiently leverage unaligned geo-entity attributes across spatial neighbors: (1) A plugin module, namely Unaligned Message-Passing (UMP), that propagates unaligned neighbor features to integrate geo-context into the token embeddings output by language model; (2) a contextualized pretraining framework (CP) that allows the former to leverage unlabelled geo-entity data. Experiments show that our method surpasses the baselines, achieving higher F1 scores on 8 real-world geo-datasets in terms of robustness, with an improvement of up to 7.9%. The ablation study further justifies our proposal.