Semantic Services for Wikipedia

Abstract

Wikipedia, a killer application in Web 2.0, has embraced the power of collaborative editing to harness collective intelligence. It features many attractive characteristics, like entity-based link graph, abundant categorization and semi-structured layout, and can serve as an ideal data source to extract high quality and well-structured data. In this chapter, we first propose several solutions to extract knowledge from Wikipedia. We do not only consider information from the relational summaries of articles (infoboxes) but also semi-automatically extract it from the article text using the structured content available. Due to differences with information extraction from the Web, it is necessary to tackle new problems, like the lack of redundancy in Wikipedia that is dealt with by extending traditional machine learning algorithms to work with few labeled data. Furthermore, we also exploit the widespread categories as a complementary way to discover additional knowledge. Benefiting from both structured and textural information, we additionally provide a suggestion service for Wikipedia authoring. With the aim to facilitate semantic reuse, our proposal provides users with facilities such as link, categories and infobox content suggestions. The proposed enhancements can be applied to attract more contributors and lighten the burden of professional editors. Finally, we developed an enhanced search system, which can ease the process of exploiting Wikipedia. To provide a user-friendly interface, it extends the faceted search interface with relation navigation and let the user easily express his complex information needs in an interactive way. In order to achieve efficient query answering, it extends scalable IR engines to index and search both the textual and structured information with an integrated ranking support.