Analysing entity context in multilingual wikipedia to support entity-centric retrieval applications

Abstract

Representation of influential entities, such as famous people and multinational corporations, on the Web can vary across languages, reflecting language-specific entity aspects as well as divergent views on these entities in different communities. A systematic analysis of languagespecific entity contexts can provide a better overview of the existing aspects and support entity-centric retrieval applications over multilingual Web data. An important source of cross-lingual information about influential entities is Wikipedia — an online community-created encyclopaedia — containing more than 280 language editions. In this paper we focus on the extraction and analysis of the language-specific entity contexts from different Wikipedia language editions over multilingual data. We discuss alternative ways such contexts can be built, including graph-based and article-based contexts. Furthermore, we analyse the similarities and the differences in these contexts in a case study including 80 entities and five Wikipedia language editions.