Graph-based Methods for Large-Scale Multilingual Knowledge Integration

Given that much of our knowledge is expressed in textual form, infor-mation systems increasingly depend on knowledge about words and the entities they represent. This book investigates novel methods for automatically building large repositories of knowledge that capture semantic relationships between words, names, and entities, in many different languages. Three major new contributions are presented, each involving graph algorithms and statistical techniques that com-bine evidence from multiple sources of information.

The lexical integration method involves learning models that disambiguate word meanings based on contextual information in a graph, thereby providing a means to connect words to the entities that they denote. The entity integration method combines semantic items from
different sources into a single unified registry of entities by reconciling equivalence and distinctness information and solving a combinatorial optimization problem. Finally, the taxonomic integration method adds a comprehensive and coherent taxonomic hierarchy on top of this registry, capturing how different entities relate to each other.

Together, these methods can be used to produce a large-scale multi-lingual knowledge base semantically describing over 5 million entities and over 16 million natural language words and names in more than 200 different languages.