Interpreting open-domain modifiers: Decomposition of Wikipedia categories into disambiguated property-value Pairs

Abstract

This paper proposes an open-domain method for automatically annotating modifier constituents (“20th-century”) within Wikipedia categories (“20th-century male writers”) with properties (“date of birth”). The annotations offer a semantically-anchored understanding of the role of the constituents in defining the underlying meaning of the categories. In experiments over an evaluation set of Wikipedia categories, the proposed method annotates constituent modifiers as semantically-anchored properties, rather than as mere strings in a previous method. It does so at a better trade-off between precision and recall.