On June 5th, Nicolas Heist, supervised by Heiko Paulheim, has defended his thesis on “Exploiting Semi-Structured Information in Wikipedia for Knowledge Graph Construction”. His thesis was concerned with exploiting structures such as categories, lists, and tables in Wikipedia for creating a general-purpose cross-domain knowledge graph.
Throughout his thesis, Nicolas explored various techniques for ontology construction and axiom learning, named entity recognition, entity clustering and linking (incl. NIL entities, i.e., entities not contained in a knowledge graph), and many more. The efforts of his thesis went into the open source knowledge graph CaLiGraph.
The examination committee consisted of Heiko Paulheim, Christian Bizer, Markus Strohmaier, and Harald Sack.
Nicolas will continue working in the area of knowledge graphs at Metaphacts.