Many objects appear with multiple names that are substrings, acronyms, abbreviations, or other simple variations of one another.
our probabilistic String Similarity Model (SSM) assumes a similarity function The model sets the probability of s 1 co-referring with s 2 to a smoothed version of the similarity: The particular choice of α and β make little difference to our results, so long as they are chosen such that the resulting probability can never be one or zero.