Building event-centric knowledge graphs from news

Abstract

Knowledge graphs have gained increasing popularity in the past couple of years, thanks to their adoption in everyday search engines. Typically, they consist of fairly static and encyclopedic facts about persons and organizations–e.g. a celebrity’s birth date, occupation and family members–obtained from large repositories such as Freebase or Wikipedia.In this paper, we present a method and tools to automatically build knowledge graphs from news articles. As news articles describe changes in the world through the events they report, we present an approach to create Event-Centric Knowledge Graphs (ECKGs) using state-of-the-art natural language processing and semantic web techniques. Such ECKGs capture long-term developments and histories on hundreds of thousands of entities and are complementary to the static encyclopedic information in traditional knowledge graphs.We describe our event-centric representation schema, the challenges in extracting event information from news, our open source pipeline, and the knowledge graphs we have extracted from four different news corpora: general news (Wikinews), the FIFA world cup, the Global Automotive Industry, and Airbus A380 airplanes. Furthermore, we present an assessment on the accuracy of the pipeline in extracting the triples of the knowledge graphs. Moreover, through an event-centered browser and visualization tool we show how approaching information from news in an event-centric manner can increase the user’s understanding of the domain, facilitates the reconstruction of news story lines, and enable to perform exploratory investigation of news hidden facts.