Automated Knowledge Base Construction
CMPSCI 791-KC, Fall 2011

Monday 3:30-5:30pm, Rm 140

Instructors: Andrew McCallum and Sebastian Riedel


Good decision-making is dependent on comprehensive, accurate knowledge. But the information relevant to many important decisions in areas such as business, government, medicine and scientific research is massive, and growing at an accelerating pace. Relevant raw data is widely available on the web and other data sources, but usually in order to be useful it must be gathered, extracted, organized, and normalized into a queryable, minable knowledge base.  Hand-built knowledge bases such as Wikipedia have proven useful, but more than human editing will be necessary to create a wide variety of domain-specific, deeply comprehensive, highly-structured knowledge bases.  Various automated methods have begun to reach levels of accuracy and scalability that make them applicable to automatically constructing useful knowledge bases from text and other sources.  These capabilities have been enabled by research in areas including natural language processing, information extraction, information integration, databases, search and machine learning.  In this seminar we will relevant read papers in all these areas, write responses to them, and discuss them.  Students will also have the option to join a team of volunteers who will build a system that constructs a KB of all UMass faculty, postdocs and graduate students, and strives to predict students' year of PhD completion.

Syllabus and Reading List coming soon.