Real-time RDF extraction from unstructured data streams

Abstract

The vision behind the Web of Data is to extend the current document-oriented Web with machine-readable facts and structured data, thus creating a representation of general knowledge. However, most of the Web of Data is limited to being a large compendium of encyclopedic knowledge describing entities. A huge challenge, the timely and massive extraction of RDF facts from unstructured data, has remained open so far. The availability of such knowledge on the Web of Data would provide significant benefits to manifold applications including news retrieval, sentiment analysis and business intelligence. In this paper, we address the problem of the actuality of the Web of Data by presenting an approach that allows extracting RDF triples from unstructured data streams. We employ statistical methods in combination with deduplication, disambiguation and unsupervised as well as supervised machine learning techniques to create a knowledge base that reflects the content of the input streams. We evaluate a sample of the RDF we generate against a large corpus of news streams and show that we achieve a precision of more than 85%. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.