Paper accepted at EDBT 2019

Our systems and applications paper

Extending Cross-Domain Knowledge Bases with Long Tail Entities using Web Table Data (Yaser Oulabi, Christian Bizer)

got accepted at the 22nd International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT 2019), one of the top-tier conferences in the data management field!

Abstract of the paper:

 Cross-domain knowledge bases such as YAGO, DBpedia, or the Google Knowledge Graph are being used as background knowledge within an increasing range of applications including web search, data integration, natural language understanding, and question answering. The usefulness of a knowledge base for these applications depends on its completeness. Relational HTML tables that are published on the Web cover a wide range of topics and describe very specific long tail entities, such as small villages, less-known football players, or obscure songs. This systems and applications paper explores the potential of web table data for the task of completing cross-domain knowledge bases with descriptions of formerly unknown entities. We present the first system that handles all steps that are necessary for this task: schema matching, row clustering, entity creation, and new detection. The evaluation of the system using a manually labeled gold standard shows that it can construct formerly unknown instances and their descriptions from table data with an average F1 score of 0.80. In a second experiment, we apply the system to a large corpus of web tables extracted from the Common Crawl. This experiment allows us to get an overall impression of the potential of web tables for augmenting knowledge bases with long tail entities. The experiment shows that we can augment the DBpedia knowledge base with descriptions of 14 thousand new football players as well as 187 thousand new songs. The accuracy of the facts describing these instances is 0.90.

PDF of the paper:

Yaser Oulabi, Christian Bizer: Extending Cross-Domain Knowledge Bases with Long Tail Entities using Web Table Data. EDBT 2019.

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