Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Automatic Knowledge Base Construction and Web-scale Knowledge Extraction (AKBC-WEKEX)

Recently, there has been a significant amount of interest in automatically creating large-scale knowledge bases (KBs) from unstructured text. The Web-scale knowledge extraction task presents a unique set of opportunities and challenges. The resulting knowledge bases can have the advantage of scale and coverage. They have been enriched by linking to the Semantic Web, in particular the growing linked open dataset (LOD). These semantic knowledge bases have been used for a wide variety of Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Representation, and Reasoning applications such as semantic search, question answering, entity resolution, ontology mapping etc. The automatic construction of these KBs has been enabled by research in areas including natural language processing, information extraction, information integration, databases, search and machine learning. There are substantial scientific and engineering challenges in advancing and integrating such relevant methodologies.With this year’s workshop, we would like to resume the positive experiences from two previous workshops: AKBC-2010 and WEKEX-2011. The joint AKBC-WEKEX workshop will serve as a forum for researchers working in the area of automated knowledge harvesting from text. By having invited talks by leading researchers from industry, academia, and the government, and by focusing particularly on vision papers, we aim to provide a vivid forum of discussion about the field of automated knowledge base construction. For more details on the workshop, please visit: http://akbcwekex2012. wordpress. com/