Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge: Using Wikipedia as a Source of Linguistic Evidence

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that has grown to become one
of the largest online repositories of encyclopedic knowledge, with
millions of articles available for a large number of languages. In fact,
Wikipedia editions are available for more than 200 languages, with a
number of entries varying from a few pages to more than one million
articles per language. In this talk, I will describe the use of Wikipedia
as a source of linguistic evidence for natural language processing tasks.
In particular, I will show how this online encyclopedia can be used to
achieve state-of-the-art results on two text processing tasks: automatic
keyword extraction and word sense disambiguation. I will also show how the
two methods can be combined into a system able to automatically enrich a
text with links to encyclopedic knowledge. Given an input document, the
system identifies the important concepts in the text and automatically
links these concepts to the corresponding Wikipedia pages. Evaluations of
the system showed that the automatic annotations are reliable and hardly
distinguishable from manual annotations. Additionally, an evaluation of
the system in an educational environment showed that the availability of
encyclopedic knowledge within easy reach of a learner can improve both the
quality of the knowledge acquired and the time needed to obtain such
knowledge.
Rada Mihalcea is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering at University of North Texas. Her research
interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical
semantics, graph-based algorithms for natural language processing, and
multilingual natural language processing. She serves or has served on the
editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language
Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, and Research in
Language in Computation. Her research has been funded by the National
Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Google, and
the State of Texas. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation
CAREER award (2008) and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists
and Engineers (2009).