Acquiring Relational Patterns from Wikipedia: A Case Study

Abstract

This paper proposes the automatic acquisition of binary relational patterns (i.e. portions of text expressing a relation between two entities) from Wikipedia. There are a few advantages behind the use of Wikipedia: (i) relations are represented in the DBpedia ontology, which provides a repository of concepts to be used as semantic variables within patterns; (ii) most of the DBpedia relations appear in Wikipedia infoboxes, and are likely to be expressed in the corresponding pages, which increases the effectiveness of the extraction process; (iii) finally, as Wikipedia has pages in several languages, this opens the possibility for the acquisition of multilingual relational patterns. We show that a relatively simple methodology performs quite well on a set of selected DBpedia relations, for which a benchmark has been realized.