Enishi: Searching knowledge about relations by complementarily utilizing wikipedia and the web

Abstract

How global warming and agriculture mutually influence each other? It is possible to answer the question by searching knowledge about the relation between global warming and agriculture. As exemplified by this question, strong demands exist for searching relations between objects. However, methods or systems for searching relations are not well studied. In this paper, we propose a relation search system named "Enishi." Enishi supplies a wealth of diverse multimedia information for deep understanding of relations between two objects by complementarily utilizing knowledge from Wikipedia and the Web. Enishi first mines elucidatory objects constituting relations between two objects from Wikipedia. We then propose new approaches for Enishi to search more multimedia information about relations on the Web using elucidatory objects. Finally, we confirm through experiments that our new methods can search useful information from the Web for deep understanding of relations. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.