Abstract
In this paper, we introduce a minimally supervised method for learning to classify named-entity titles in a given encyclopedia into broad semantic categories in an existing ontology. Our main idea involves using overlapping entries in the encyclopedia and ontology and a small set of 30 handed tagged parenthetic explanations to automatically generate the training data. The proposed method involves automatically recognizing whether a title is a named entity, automatically generating two sets of training data, and automatically building a classification model for training a classification model based on textual and non-textual features. We present WikiSense, an implementation of the proposed method for extending the named entity coverage of WordNet by sense tagging Wikipedia titles. Experimental results show WikiSense achieves accuracy of over 95% and near 80% applicability for all NE titles in Wikipedia. WikiSense cleanly produces over 1.2 million of NEs tagged with broad categories, based on the lexicographers' files of WordNet, effectively extending WordNet to form a very large scale semantic category, a potentially useful resource for many natural language related tasks. © 2009 by Joseph Chang, Richard Tzong-Han Tsai, and Jason S. Chang.