Organizing and Searching the World Wide Web of Facts - Step Two: Harnessing the Wisdom of the Crowds

摘要

As part of a large effort to acquire large repositories of facts from unstructured text on the Web, a seed-based framework for textual information extraction allows for weakly supervised extraction of class attributes (e.g., side effects and generic equivalent for drugs) from anonymized query logs. The extraction is guided by a small set of seed attributes, without any need for handcrafted extraction patterns or further domain-specific knowledge. The attributes of classes pertaining to various domains of interest to Web search users have accuracy levels significantly exceeding cur-rent state of the art. Inherently noisy search queries are shown to be a highly valuable, albeit unexplored, resource for Web-based information extraction, in particular for the task of class attribute extraction.