The fifteen problems · 08 of 15 · identity
Entity matching was degenerate
The entity-match layer produced 5,425 matches across 44 documents. Ethiopia alone matched 3,559 times across all 44. Ten entities accounted for 76 percent of 105,831 candidate links. An entity that matches in every document discriminates nothing.
The entity-match layer produced 5,425 matches across the 44 English news documents. Ethiopia alone matched 3,559 times across all 44; then Ethiopians, Ethiopian, Amharic. In the wider run, ten entities accounted for 76 percent of 105,831 candidate links.
Those are true matches and worthless ones: an entity that matches in every document discriminates nothing. Two denominators were published after an over-claim (528 raw matches, 37.36 percent of one base, 31.26 percent of another), which is its own small lesson about reporting a percentage without its base.
× What it broke
Retrieval by shared entity. The matches were real and carried no information, and the first report of them over-claimed.
✓ What it established
The lens-graph architecture's answer is IDF weighting, which makes a term present in every subgraph contribute nothing, and "de-degenerated anchors" as an explicit phase requirement.
2026-08-06 (entity matching found degenerate) · build report §4.8 · retrieved 2026-08-21
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