Mining Domain-Specific Thesauri from Wikipedia: A Case Study

  • Authors:
  • David Milne;Olena Medelyan;Ian H. Witten

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Waikato, New Zealand;University of Waikato, New Zealand;University of Waikato, New Zealand

  • Venue:
  • WI '06 Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Domain-specific thesauri are high-cost, high-maintenance, high-value knowledge structures. We show how the classic thesaurus structure of terms and links can be mined automatically from Wikipedia. In a comparison with a professional thesaurus for agriculture we find that Wikipedia contains a substantial proportion of its concepts and semantic relations; furthermore it has impressive coverage of contemporary documents in the domain. Thesauri derived using our techniques capitalize on existing public efforts and tend to reflect contemporary language usage better than their costly, painstakingly-constructed manual counterparts.