Wikipedia as an Ontology for Describing Documents

Identifying topics and concepts associated with a set of documents is a task common to many applications. It can help in the annotation and categorization of documents and be used to model a person's current interests for improving search results, business intelligence or selecting appropriate advertisements. One approach is to associate a document with a set of topics selected from a fixed ontology or vocabulary of terms. We have investigated using Wikipedia's articles and associated pages as a topic ontology for this purpose. The benefits are that the ontology terms are developed through a social process, maintained and kept current by the Wikipedia community, represent a consensus view, and have meaning that can be understood simply by reading the associated Wikipedia page. We use Wikipedia articles and the category and article link graphs to predict concepts common to a set of documents. We describe several algorithms to aggregate and refine results, including the use of...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICWSM
• Authors: Zareen Saba Syed, Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi
• Keywords: ICWSM 2008, Internet Technology, Link Graph, Ontology, Wikipedia Category Graph