Graph-based relation mining

Abstract

Relationship mining or Relation Extraction (RE) is the task of identifying the different relations that might exist between two or more named entities. Relation extraction can be exploited in order to enhance the usability of a variety of applications, including web search, information retrieval, question answering and others. This paper presents a novel unsupervised method for relation extraction which casts the problem of RE into a graph-based framework. In this framework, entities are represented as vertices in a graph, while edges between vertices are drawn according to the distributional similarity of the corresponding entities. The RE problem is then formulated in a bootstrapping manner as an edge prediction problem, where in each iteration the target is to identify pairs of disconnected vertices (entities) most likely to share a relation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.