Query-driven on-the-fly knowledge base construction

AbstractToday's openly available knowledge bases, such as DBpedia, Yago, Wikidata or Freebase, capture billions of facts about the world's entities. However, even the largest among these (i) are still limited in up-to-date coverage of what happens in the real world, and (ii) miss out on many relevant predicates that precisely capture the wide variety of relationships among entities. To overcome both of these limitations, we propose a novel approach to build on-the-fly knowledge bases in a query-driven manner. Our system, called QKBfly, supports analysts and journalists as well as question answering on emerging topics, by dynamically acquiring relevant facts as timely and comprehensively as possible. QKBfly is based on a semantic-graph representation of sentences, by which we perform three key IE tasks, namely named-entity disambiguation, co-reference resolution and relation extraction, in a light-weight and integrated manner. In contrast to Open IE, our output is canonicalized. In contrast to traditional IE, we capture more predicates, including ternary and higher-arity ones. Our experiments demonstrate that QKBfly can build high-quality, on-the-fly knowledge bases that can readily be deployed, e.g., for the task of ad-hoc question answering.