Modeling Term Descriptions Using Wikipedia and its Application to Encyclopedic Search

Abstract

Reflecting the rapid growth of science, technology, and culture, it has become common practice to consult tools on the World Wide Web for various terms. Existing search engines provide an enormous volume of information, but retrieved information is not organized. Handcompiled encyclopedias provide organized information, but the quantity of information is limited. To integrate the advantages of both tools, we have been proposing methods for encyclopedic search targeting information on the Web and patent information. In this paper, we propose a method to categorize multiple expository texts for a single term based on viewpoints. Because viewpoints required for explanation are different depending on the type of a term, such as animals and diseases, it is difficult to manually produce a large scale system. We use Wikipedia to extract a prototype of a viewpoint structure for each term type. We also use articles in Wikipedia for a machine learning method, which categorizes a given text into an appropriate viewpoint. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method experimentally.