Using Wikitology for Cross-Document Entity Coreference Resolution

We describe the use of the Wikitology knowledge base as a resource for a variety of applications with special focus on a cross-document entity coreference resolution task. This task involves recognizing when entities and relations mentioned in different documents refer to the same object or relation in the world. Wikitology is a knowledge base system constructed with material from Wikipedia, DBpedia and Freebase that includes both unstructured text and semi-structured information. Wikitology was used to define features that were part of a system implemented by the Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence for the 2008 Automatic Content Extraction cross-document coreference resolution evaluation organized by National Institute of Standards and Technology.