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.