Analysis of Implicit Relations on Wikipedia: Measuring Strength through Mining Elucidatory Objects

Abstract

We focus on measuring relations between pairs of objects in Wikipedia whose pages can be regarded as individual objects. Two kinds of relations between two objects exist: in Wikipedia, an explicit relation is represented by a single link between the two pages for the objects, and an implicit relation is represented by a link structure containing the two pages. Previously proposed methods are inadequate for measuring implicit relations because they use only one or two of the following three important factors: distance, connectivity, and co-citation. We propose a new method reflecting all the three factors by using a generalized maximum flow. We confirm that our method can measure the strength of a relation more appropriately than these previously proposed methods do. Another remarkable aspect of our method is mining elucidatory objects, that is, objects constituting a relation. We explain that mining elucidatory objects opens a novel way to deeply understand a relation.