IKE - An Interactive Tool for Knowledge Extraction

Recent work on information extraction has suggested that fast, interactive tools can be highly effective; however, creating a usable system is challenging, and few publically available tools exist. In this paper we present IKE, a new extraction tool that performs fast, interactive bootstrapping to develop high-quality extraction patterns for targeted relations. Central to IKE is the notion that an extraction pattern can be treated as a search query over a corpus. To operationalize this, IKE uses a novel query language that is expressive, easy to understand, and fast to execute essential requirements for a practical system. It is also the first interactive extraction tool to seamlessly integrate symbolic (boolean) and distributional (similarity-based) methods for search. An initial evaluation suggests that relation tables can be populated substantially faster than by manual pattern authoring while retaining accuracy, and more reliably than fully automated tools, an important step towards practical KB construction. We are making IKE publically available (http://allenai.org/ software/interactive-knowledge-extraction).