Wikitology : Using Wikipedia as an Ontology

Abstract

Identifying topics and concepts associated with a set of documents is a task common to many applications. It can help in the annotation and categorization of documents and be used to model a person's current interests for improving search results, business intelligence or selecting appropriate advertisements. We are investigating the use of Wikipedia's articles and associated pages as a topic ontology for this purpose. The benefits of the approach are that the ontology terms are developed through a social process, maintained and kept current by the Wikipedia community, represent a consensus view, and have meaning that can be understood by reading the associated pages. We have demonstrated the use of Wikitology to improve the performance of an information retrieval system and as a source of evidence in a intra-document entity co-reference task.