Wanderlust: Extracting Semantic Relations from Natural Language Text Using Dependency Grammar Patterns

A great share of applications in modern information technology can benefit from large coverage, machine accessible knowledge bases. However, the bigger part of todays knowledge is provided in the form of unstructured data, mostly plain text. As an initial step to exploit such data, we present Wanderlust, an algorithm that automatically extracts semantic relations from natural language text. The procedure uses deep linguistic patterns that are defined over the dependency grammar of sentences. Due to its linguistic nature, the method performs in an unsupervised fashion and is not restricted to any specific type of semantic relation. The applicability of the proposed approach is examined in a case study, in which it is put to the task of generating a semantic wiki from the English Wikipedia corpus. We present an exhaustive discussion about the insights obtained from this particular case study including considerations about the generality of the approach.