Mining and Re-ranking for Answering Biographical Queries on the Web

The rapid growth of the Web has made itself a huge and valuable knowledge base. Among them, biographical information is of great interest to society. However, there has not been an efficient and complete approach to automated biography creation by querying the web. This paper describes an automatic web-based question answering system for biographical queries. Ad-hoc improvements on pattern learning approaches are proposed for mining biographical knowledge. Using bootstrapping, our approach learns surface text patterns from the web, and applies the learned patterns to extract relevant information. To reduce human labeling cost, we propose a new IDF-inspired reranking approach and compare it with pattern’s precisionbased re-ranking approach. A comparative study of the two re-ranking models is conducted. The tested system produces promising results for answering biographical queries.