How to find similar noun phrases in NLP?

Question

Is there a way to identify similar noun phrases. Some suggest use pattern-based approaches, for example X as Y expressions:

Usain Bolt as Sprint King

Liverpool as Reds

Answer 1

There are many techniques to find alternative names for a given entity, using patterns such as:

• X also known as Y
• X also titled as Y

and scanning large collections of documents (e.g., Wikipedia or news papers articles) is one way to do it.

There are also other alternatives, one I remember is using Wikipedia inter-links structure, for instance, by exploring the redirect links between articles. You can download a file with a list of redirects from here: https://wiki.dbpedia.org/Downloads2015-04 and exploring the file you can find alternative names/synonyms for entities, e.g.:

• Kennedy_Centre -> John_F._Kennedy_Center_for_the_Performing_Arts>
• Lord_Alton_of_Liverpool -> David_Alton,_Baron_Alton_of_Liverpool
• Indiana_jones_2 -> Indiana_Jones_and_the_Temple_of_Doom

Another thing you can do is combine these two techniques, for instance, look for text segments where both Indiana Jones and Indiana_Jones_and_the_Temple_of_Doom occur and are not further apart more than, let's say, 4 or 5 tokens. You might find patterns like also titled as, then you can use these patterns to find more synonyms/alternative names.