DeFacto-Deep fact validation

Abstract

One of the main tasks when creating and maintaining knowledge bases is to validate facts and provide sources for them in order to ensure correctness and traceability of the provided knowledge. So far, this task is often addressed by human curators in a three-step process: issuing appropriate keyword queries for the statement to check using standard search engines, retrieving potentially relevant documents and screening those documents for relevant content. The drawbacks of this process are manifold. Most importantly, it is very time-consuming as the experts have to carry out several search processes and must often read several documents. In this article, we present DeFacto (Deep Fact Validation)-an algorithm for validating facts by finding trustworthy sources for it on the Web. DeFacto aims to provide an effective way of validating facts by supplying the user with relevant excerpts of webpages as well as useful additional information including a score for the confidence DeFacto has in the correctness of the input fact. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.