Language-Agnostic Relation Extraction from Wikipedia Abstracts

Nicolas Heist, Heiko Paulheim

Abstract: Large-scale knowledge graphs, such as DBpedia, Wikidata, or YAGO, can be enhanced by relation extraction from text, using the data in the knowledge graph as training data, i.e., using distant supervision. While most existing approaches use language-specific methods (usually for English), we present a language-agnostic approach that exploits background knowledge from the graph instead of language-specific techniques and builds machine learning models only from language-independent features. We demonstrate the extraction of relations from Wikipedia abstracts, using the twelve largest language editions of Wikipedia. From those, we can extract 1.6M new relations in DBpedia at a level of precision of 95%, using a RandomForest classifier trained only on language-independent features. Furthermore, we show an exemplary geographical breakdown of the information extracted.