35,730 research outputs found
Knowledge Base Population using Semantic Label Propagation
A crucial aspect of a knowledge base population system that extracts new
facts from text corpora, is the generation of training data for its relation
extractors. In this paper, we present a method that maximizes the effectiveness
of newly trained relation extractors at a minimal annotation cost. Manual
labeling can be significantly reduced by Distant Supervision, which is a method
to construct training data automatically by aligning a large text corpus with
an existing knowledge base of known facts. For example, all sentences
mentioning both 'Barack Obama' and 'US' may serve as positive training
instances for the relation born_in(subject,object). However, distant
supervision typically results in a highly noisy training set: many training
sentences do not really express the intended relation. We propose to combine
distant supervision with minimal manual supervision in a technique called
feature labeling, to eliminate noise from the large and noisy initial training
set, resulting in a significant increase of precision. We further improve on
this approach by introducing the Semantic Label Propagation method, which uses
the similarity between low-dimensional representations of candidate training
instances, to extend the training set in order to increase recall while
maintaining high precision. Our proposed strategy for generating training data
is studied and evaluated on an established test collection designed for
knowledge base population tasks. The experimental results show that the
Semantic Label Propagation strategy leads to substantial performance gains when
compared to existing approaches, while requiring an almost negligible manual
annotation effort.Comment: Submitted to Knowledge Based Systems, special issue on Knowledge
Bases for Natural Language Processin
Quootstrap: Scalable Unsupervised Extraction of Quotation-Speaker Pairs from Large News Corpora via Bootstrapping
We propose Quootstrap, a method for extracting quotations, as well as the
names of the speakers who uttered them, from large news corpora. Whereas prior
work has addressed this problem primarily with supervised machine learning, our
approach follows a fully unsupervised bootstrapping paradigm. It leverages the
redundancy present in large news corpora, more precisely, the fact that the
same quotation often appears across multiple news articles in slightly
different contexts. Starting from a few seed patterns, such as ["Q", said S.],
our method extracts a set of quotation-speaker pairs (Q, S), which are in turn
used for discovering new patterns expressing the same quotations; the process
is then repeated with the larger pattern set. Our algorithm is highly scalable,
which we demonstrate by running it on the large ICWSM 2011 Spinn3r corpus.
Validating our results against a crowdsourced ground truth, we obtain 90%
precision at 40% recall using a single seed pattern, with significantly higher
recall values for more frequently reported (and thus likely more interesting)
quotations. Finally, we showcase the usefulness of our algorithm's output for
computational social science by analyzing the sentiment expressed in our
extracted quotations.Comment: Accepted at the 12th International Conference on Web and Social Media
(ICWSM), 201
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