Harvesting, searching, and ranking knowledge on the web: invited talk

  • Authors:

  • Gerhard Weikum

  • Affiliations:

  • Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbruecken, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

There are major trends to advance the functionality of search engines to a more expressive semantic level (e.g., [2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 18]). This is enabled by employing large-scale information extraction [1, 11, 20] of entities and relationships from semistructured as well as natural-language Web sources. In addition, harnessing Semantic-Web-style ontologies [22] and reaching into Deep-Web sources [16] can contribute towards a grand vision of turning the Web into a comprehensive knowledge base that can be efficiently searched with high precision. This talk presents ongoing research towards this objective, with emphasis on our work on the YAGO knowledge base [23, 24] and the NAGA search engine [14] but also covering related projects. YAGO is a large collection of entities and relational facts that are harvested from Wikipedia and WordNet with high accuracy and reconciled into a consistent RDF-style "semantic" graph. For further growing YAGO from Web sources while retaining its high quality, pattern-based extraction is combined with logic-based consistency checking in a unified framework [25]. NAGA provides graph-template-based search over this data, with powerful ranking capabilities based on a statistical language model for graphs. Advanced queries and the need for ranking approximate matches pose efficiency and scalability challenges that are addressed by algorithmic and indexing techniques [15, 17]. YAGO is publicly available and has been imported into various other knowledge-management projects including DB-pedia. YAGO shares many of its goals and methodologies with parallel projects along related lines. These include Avatar [19], Cimple/DBlife [10, 21], DBpedia [3], Know-ItAll/TextRunner [12, 5], Kylin/KOG [26, 27], and the Libra technology [18, 28] (and more). Together they form an exciting trend towards providing comprehensive knowledge bases with semantic search capabilities.