Linking, Searching, and Visualizing Entities in Wikipedia

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a new system to extract, index, search, and visualize entities in Wikipedia. To carry out the entity extraction, we designed a high-performance, multilingual, entity linker and we used a document model to store the resulting linguistic annotations. The entity linker, HEDWIG, extracts the mentions from text using a string matching engine and links them to entities with a combination of statistical rules and PageRank. The document model, Docforia, consists of layers, where each layer is a sequence of ranges describing a specific annotation, here the entities. We evaluated HEDWIG with the TAC 2016 data and protocol and we reached the CEAFm scores of 70.0 on English, on 64.4 on Chinese, and 66.5 on Spanish. We applied the entity linker to the whole collection of English and Swedish articles of Wikipedia and we used Lucene to index the layers and a search module to interactively retrieve all the concordances of an entity in Wikipedia. The user can select and visualize the concordances in the articles or paragraphs. Contrary to classic text indexing, this system does not use strings to identify the entities but unique identifiers from Wikidata. A demonstration of the entity search and visualization will be available for English at this address http://vilde.cs.lth.se:9001/en-hedwig/ and for Swedish at: http://vilde.cs.lth.se:9001/sv-hedwig/.

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