An Evaluation of Technologies for Knowledge Base Population

Previous content extraction evaluations have neglected to address problems which complicate the incorporation of extracted information into an existing knowledge base. Previous question answering evaluations have likewise avoided tasks such as explicit disambiguation of target entities and handling a fixed set of questions about entities without previous determination of possible answers. In 2009 NIST conducted a Knowledge Base Population track at its Text Analysis Conference to unite the content extraction and question answering communities and jointly explore some of these issues. This exciting new evaluation attracted 13 teams from 6 countries that submitted results in two tasks, Entity Linking and Slot Filling. This paper explains the motivation and design of the tasks, describes the language resources that were developed for this evaluation, offers comparisons to previous community evaluations, and briefly summarizes the performance obtained by systems. We also identify relevant issues pertaining to target selection, challenging queries, and performance measures.