Wikipedia and How to Use It for Semantic Document Representation

Abstract

Wikipedia is a goldmine of information; not just for its many readers, but also for the growing community of researchers who recognize it as a resource of exceptional scale and utility. It represents a vast investment of manual effort and judgment: a huge, constantly evolving tapestry of concepts and relations that is being applied to a host of tasks. This talk focuses on the process of ”wikification”; that is, automatically and judiciously augmenting a plain-text document with pertinent hyperlinks to Wikipedia articlesas though the document were itself a Wikipedia article. I first describe how Wikipedia can be used to determine semantic relatedness between concepts. Then I explain how to wikify documents by exploiting Wikipedia’s internal hyperlinks for relational information and their anchor texts as lexical information. Data mining techniques are used throughout to optimize the models involved.