Cleansing Wikipedia Categories using Centrality

Paolo Boldi, Corrado Monti

Abstract: We propose a novel general technique aimed at pruning and cleansing the Wikipedia category hierarchy, with a tunable level of aggregation. Our approach is endogenous, since it does not use any information coming from Wikipedia articles, but it is based solely on the user-generated (noisy) Wikipedia category folksonomy itself. We show how the proposed techniques can help reduce the level of noise in the hierarchy and discuss how alternative centrality measures can differently impact on the result.