More informative open information extraction via simple inference

Abstract

Recent Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) systems utilize grammatical structure to extract facts with very high recall and good precision. In this paper, we point out that a significant fraction of the extracted facts is, however, not informative. For example, for the sentence The ICRW is a non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, the extracted fact (a non-profit organization) (is headquartered in) (Washington) is not informative. This is a problem for semantic search applications utilizing these triples, which is hard to fix once the triple extraction is completed. We therefore propose to integrate a set of simple inference rules into the extraction process. Our evaluation shows that, even with these simple rules, the percentage of informative triples can be improved considerably and the already high recall can be improved even further. Both improvements directly increase the quality of search on these triples. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.