Mining and explaining relationships in Wikipedia

Abstract

Mining and explaining relationships between objects are challenging tasks in the field of knowledge search. We propose a new approach for the tasks using disjoint paths formed by links in Wikipedia. To realizing this approach, we propose a naive and a generalized flow based method, and a technique of avoiding flow confluences for forcing a generalized flow to be disjoint as possible. We also apply the approach to classification of relationships. Our experiments reveal that the generalized flow based method can mine many disjoint paths important for a relationship, and the classification is effective for explaining relationships. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.