Knowledge base refinement using limited amount of efforts from experts

Knowledge bases are essential for supporting decision making during intelligent information processing. Automatic construction of knowledge bases becomes infeasible without labeled data, a complete table of data records including answers to queries. Preparing such information requires huge efforts from experts. The authors propose a new knowledge base refinement framework based on pattern mining and active learning using an existing available knowledge base constructed from a different domain (source domain) solving the same task as well as some data collected from the target domain. The knowledge base investigated in this paper is represented by a model known as Markov Logic Networks. The authors' proposed method first analyzes the unlabeled target domain data and actively asks the expert to provide labels (or answers) a very small amount of automatically selected queries. The idea is to identify the target domain queries whose underlying relations are not sufficiently described by the existing source domain knowledge base. Potential relational patterns are discovered and new logic relations are constructed for the target domain by exploiting the limited amount of labeled target domain data and the unlabeled target domain data. The authors have conducted extensive experiments by applying our approach to two different text mining applications, namely, pronoun resolution and segmentation of citation records, demonstrating consistent improvements. Copyright © 2014 IGI Publishing Hershey.