An approach for deriving semantically related category hierarchies from Wikipedia category graphs

Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia known to date. Its rich content and semi-structured nature has made it into a very valuable research tool used for classification, information extraction, and semantic annotation, among others. Many applications can benefit from the presence of a topic hierarchy in Wikipedia. However, what Wikipedia currently offers is a category graph built through hierarchical category links the semantics of which are un-defined. Because of this lack of semantics, a sub-category in Wikipedia does not necessarily comply with the concept of a sub-category in a hierarchy. Instead, all it signifies is that there is some sort of relationship between the parent category and its sub-category. As a result, traversing the category links of any given category can often result in surprising results. For example, following the category of "Computing" down its sub-category links, the totally unrelated category of "Theology" appears. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm that through measuring the semantic relatedness between any given Wikipedia category and nodes in its sub-graph is capable of extracting a category hierarchy containing only nodes that are relevant to the parent category. The algorithm has been evaluated by comparing its output with a gold standard data set. The experimental setup and results are presented. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.