What’s in an Index: Extracting Domain-specific Knowledge Graphs from Textbooks

ABSTRACT A typical index at the end of a textbook contains a manually-provided vocabulary of terms related to the content of the textbook. In this paper, we extend our previous work on extraction of knowledge models from digital textbooks. We are taking a more critical look at the content of a textbook index and present a mechanism for classifying index terms according to their domain specificity: a core domain concept, an in-domain concept, a concept from a related domain, and a concept from a foreign domain. We link the extracted models to DBpedia and leverage the aggregated linguistic and structural information from textbooks and DBpedia to construct and prune the domain-specific knowledge graphs. The evaluation experiments demonstrate (1) the ability of the approach to identify (with high accuracy) different levels of domain specificity for automatically extracted concepts, (2) its cross-domain robustness, and (3) the added value of the domain specificity information. These results clearly indicate the improved quality of the refined knowledge graphs and widen their potential applicability.