Elementary

• DOI: 10.4018/jswis.2012070103
• Publication Date: 2013-01-14T21:57:39Z
• Authors: Feng Niu; Ce Zhang; Christopher Ré; Jude Shavlik
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Researchers have approached knowledge-base construction (KBC) with a wide range of data resources and techniques. The authors present Elementary, a prototype KBC system that is able to combine diverse resources and different KBC techniques via machine learning and statistical inference to construct knowledge bases. Using Elementary, they have implemented a solution to the TAC-KBP challenge with quality comparable to the state of the art, as well as an end-to-end online demonstration that automatically and continuously enriches Wikipedia with structured data by reading millions of webpages on a daily basis. The authors describe several challenges and their solutions in designing, implementing, and deploying Elementary. In particular, the authors first describe the conceptual framework and architecture of Elementary to integrate different data resources and KBC techniques in a principled manner. They then discuss how they address scalability challenges to enable Web-scale deployment. The authors empirically show that this decomposition-based inference approach achieves higher performance than prior inference approaches. To validate the effectiveness of Elementary’s approach to KBC, they experimentally show that its ability to incorporate diverse signals has positive impacts on KBC quality.