Do your Resources Sound Similar? On the Impact of Using Phonetic Similarity in Link Discovery

An increasing number of heterogeneous datasets abiding by the Linked Data paradigm is published everyday. Discovering links between these datasets is thus central to achieving the vision behind the Data Web. Declarative Link Discovery (LD) frameworks rely on complex Link Specification (LS) to express the conditions under which two resources should be linked. Complex LS combine similarity measures with thresholds to determine whether a given predicate holds between two resources. State of the art LD frameworks rely mostly on string-based similarity measures such as Levenshtein and Jaccard. However, string-based similarity measures often fail to catch the similarity of resources with phonetically similar property values when these property values are represented using different string representation (e.g., names and street labels). In this paper, we evaluate the impact of using phonetics-based similarities in the process of LD. Moreover, we evaluate the impact of phonetic-based similarity measures on a state-of-the-art machine learning approach used to generate LS. Our experiments suggest that the combination of string-based and phonetic-based measures can improve the Fmeasures achieved by LD frameworks on most datasets.